Hello people!
Because in my country i would have had to wait more then two weeks for the Asrock ION 330 HT, i went ahead and bought the PRO version (no wifi / no IR).
First thing i did was disassemble the little computer, exchanged the LG Tray DVD-RW with a slot loading Sony-Optiarc DVD-RW, and had a good look at the motherboard.
The motherboard is THE SAME as the HT version. It has the mini Pci-e connector (empty of course) witch is good because I also ordered a Broadcom Crystal HD Decoder (still to come) to benchmark vdpau against it.
It also has the IR HEADER (3 pins) and that gave me a reason to get this baby a remote (natively, not by a usb ir)
So i did some 5 minutes measures and got that the pinout configuration (when facing the DVD, from left to right) is :
1- Vcc ( + 5V)
2- GND
3- IR Data
I went ahead and dismembered an old Sharp VCR and got it's IR Receiver on hand, looked it up on google, and got it's PDF.
My IR receiver is a Sharp GP1U581X that has an Amp, Demodulator ( 38 Khz) and integrator and comparator. It also should work with TSOP 1738. I cut a bit of the metal inside the case to fit the receiver and connected it to the motherboard.
After this I downloaded the Asrock ION 330 HT Bios version and flashed it. The bios happily showed me the CIR Enabled / CIR Power On options.
So far so good .. but this is not a happy ending story.
I went ahead and installed the lirc-nct677x-x64-1.0.1-ubuntu9.10.deb driver, then i programmed my harmony remote to act as ION 330 HT remote. Struggled a bit with lirc config files to get the daemon to use the /dev/lirc0 device.
Results? It works.. kinda. I have to hold a button for irw to see it pressed. If i only press a button once it does not register anything. irrecord fails on the second phase with something like " RC6 remotes have toggle bits but i didn't receive one" or something like that.
I can't seem to find the 1.0.2 version of the IR driver (on the asrock site it's the 1.0.1), the one that on some people made lirc register more then one command on a single press, i would surely want to try that one given my somehow opposite problem with 1.0.1.
Cheers mates!