One thing that consistently irritated me — as I knew it would — was having to get up and cross the room to turn the Xbox on. Yeah, call me lazy, but isn’t lazniess the whole purpose of this project?

I was considering doing an IR mod to remotely power on the Xbox completely from scratch. There was a decent tutorial on Xbox-Scene on getting the appropriate parts and the code to program the IC chip. However, I found a device called the XERC made by a member of XS. At the time, the first version of the XERC was no longer available; a second version was being worked on. I messaged the seller of the XERC and was fortunate to get a XERC 2 prototype for a reasonable price. It probably cost me little more than building it myself, but the XERC is far more sophisticated than anything I could have made. It can learn to obey different remotes, and you can program any button to perform the primary functions (which you can learn about on the XERC web site). It consists of a small PCB about 1 inch square with a small chip and several connection pads.

Installing the XERC wasn’t too bad, although it did involve removing the motherboard. However, once installed it didn’t seem to work. It was getting power, and appeared to be in calibration mode, but it was acting like it wasn’t receiving any IR signals. After contacting the maker and doing some troubleshooting, we determined that the trace between the IR data connector on the PCB and the corresponding leg on the chip was broken. I bypassed it with a wire (which was difficult enough given how tiny the legs on the chip are), but when I proceeded to reassemble the Xbox the leg on the chip broke off, apparently from too much stress on it due to the wire I soldered on. Now I was pretty sure I was screwed, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I was able, with much tediousness, to effectively rebuild the tiny leg out of nothing but solder and get the chip working. Not an experience I would recommend for everyone.

The XERC works now, and I can turn the Xbox on and off from across the room. I don’t use any of the other functions, but even so it was a worthwhile mod.