My remote seems to be dead out of the box. Any advice here?

New batteries?

Good guess...but tried that one already.

Wait, how can you get the receiver to work at all when you can't get the server software running properly?

The remote won't do anything until the receiver is up and running and connected to the server. You sure the remote is DOA and it's not just that it isn't connected to the server?

In any case, try the following:

1) Remove the batteries and leave them out of the remote for a couple of minutes. Then put them back in. That might reset the firmware in the remote and make it work?

2) Do you have a video camera or a digital camera with an LCD display? Sometimes those will show infrared light pretty clearly in their images. Look at a known-good remote through your camera and see if you can see its LED blinking when a button is pressed. Then try the same thing on the Rio Receiver remote. If you see it blinking, then it's at least working and you can start looking elsewhere for troubleshooting steps.

You're right - I am not connected to the server software yet. Shouldn't the remote power on the Receiver regardless of that fact?

And I'll have to check on the blinky thing. I'll test it out with the camera at my work and let you know.

Dunno if the receiver responds to any IR at all until it's running proper software. It doesn't come with any software in memory other than the bootstrap loader, and it expects to get all of its software from the network. I don't know if that bootstrap loader includes any IR receiver capability.

So don't worry about the remote until after the receiver is working properly with the server. Once that's up and running, then test the remote and get back to us.

Shouldn't the remote power on the Receiver regardless of that fact?

Mine doesn't. Yes, that is lame.

If you've freshly plugged in the Receiver, it's off. I mean, really off -- there's no power to the Cirrus 7212. In this situation, how's it supposed to respond to IR?

Pressing the power button on the front powers up the CPU.

I suppose that we could have used a PIC to power up the CPU as soon as the mains is plugged in -- I don't recall why we didn't.

Besides, even if the CPU was powered, the initial boot firmware doesn't talk IR anyway -- it has to have loaded the software from the PC before it'll talk IR.

Dude, don't take it personally. For a consumer device it's lame. But, since my grandmother will never buy one, I guess the receiver isn't really a consumer device. The remote bit doesn't really bother me, but it should be mentioned in the manual or the "getting started guide." I too thought my batteries were DOA.