AirControl and Keyboard

So, I'm setting up Roomie to control my ATV2 using AirControl, including shortcuts to launch apps like Netflix. One of the things I would like to do is be able to send text to aircontrol for search. It is supported by sending the http command "<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">/enterText=".</span>

I've added a keyboard, but I'm unclear if I can customize what I can do with the output. Could I take the output and silently send it to aircontrol? Or am I missing something really basic?

&nbsp;

Thanks

The AirControl API doesn't publish any official information on their API page for submitting keyboard commands to Apple TV. If you can provide us a reference to an official document or post on that, we're happy to add the appropriate keyboard commands to the library.

Thank you.

I did a packet capture on the request using this tool files.firecore.com/AC/AirControl.zip (use the funny T icon) and what i could see was the when entering text it would send it to <appletvip>/enterText=<span style="background-color: #444444; color: #bbbbbb; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em;">

</span>

Special character's seem to be sent as is and seem to be received properly. I think.

If you have official information or a post documenting that, that is ideal. Alternatively, a pcap file from WireShark would do the trick. Make sure to include upper and lower case, punctuation, backspace/delete, and ideally some accented characters.

Thank you.

Hello, hope I'm not too late to the party. It is pretty easy to send text to AirControl. You would just type the url "<apple tv ip address>/enterText=<type your text>" into your browser. Now I'm not quite sure how to make this possible in roomie other than assigning a new button for every character in the alphabet which seems impractical. Any ideas?

&nbsp;

Also I saw this post a few days ago that seems to indicate that keyboard support has been added in Roomie for AirControl but I've tried adding the keyboard to my AirControl remote but the buttons aren't doing anything.

&nbsp;

<blockquote>IP Highlights

Firecore AirControl: Added Apple TV keyboard support.</blockquote>

We did recently deploy the ability to send text to AppleTV via AirControl. Either reset your Remote Design to the new default if you have a customized Remote Design, or just add a Keyboard button to your existing Remote Design.

Thank you.

Alrighty, it helps when I update the roomie app on my device. Yes the keyboard is working now, albeit I was expecting it to send each keystroke to the atv individually instead of waiting for me to enter a whole text string and then sending. This would be nice since most of the text entry places use 'predictive searching' or whatever and also deleting characters is a weird thing to do as a string. Is there a particular reason it was done this way? Too slow as individual characters or something?

So I noticed on the default remote there is a digital display at the top which looks like it could be used to display the current position (time) during a video, but it currently doesn't seem to do anything. Also I can't figure out any way to remove it from the remote design. Attached is a picture of what I'm talking about. Is this supposed to display something useful? I know that AirControl is supposed to be able to send information back but not sure if this is integrated yet or not.

That looks like it's probably associated with iTunes and not AirControl as AC provides no feedback at present. Try resetting your Remote Design and set iTunes Device to None for the Activity.

Thank you.

Ok, I reset the remote design but am not sure where I turn the iTunes Device to None, I'm not seeing an option for that in the activities section.

Also, I believe there actually is feedback support. See 'Now Playing API' here: <a href="http://support.firecore.com/entries/21375902-3rd-party-control-api-aircontrol"></a>