Cool. Is the flash used at all after boot. As long as I don't reboot, bad data writen to the flash will have no effect, correct? I would hate to have to reinstall the dev image after every failure.

While your listening, an old post from you said use 'od -Ax -txC -v -w4 /dev/ir' to see the ir data. That was pretty cool, but you suggested grep-ing it to do whatever, but I wasn't able to redirect it's output which makes me doubt that you can grep it, either. Is there another way to get IR data? How about fascia button/knob data?