Infrared Receiver Issues on Gemini Lake NUCs

I’ve been changing my NUCs back and forth recently and noticed that there’s something odd about the CIR receiver on my NUC7PJYH. I did update the BIOS recently to version 0045, but didn’t notice anything at that time. However, now it seems that the IR receiver works only for a couple of minutes after a reboot. After that it just stops working. I’m using LibreELEC, but I’ve seen similar issues being reported by other people on other Linux distributions.

So turns out there were BIOS changes made between 0027 and 0045 versions that have basically caused that. The change that causes the issue is that serial IRQ set to Continue mode but in BIOS 0042 they set serial IRQ to Quiet mode. Whatever that means. There currently is no fix for this, so the NUC is currently unusable as a HTPC or at least it needs an external IR receiver. Products impacted by this fault are NUC7CJYH and NUC7PJYH.

However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel: On the Intel NUC Communities there’s a helpful support engineer (cvare) who has confirmed the issue and pushed the developers to fix it. He was reporting last week that there’s a development version that actually is fixing the issue. So, me and many others are eagerly waiting for that to be released.

EDIT: The latest news is that they’re aiming to release the corrected BIOS by the end of next week (by Nov 2nd).

EDIT: BIOS version 0046 is out and it does fix the issue. If you want to use your IR receiver, make sure you’ve got at least 0046 installed.

1 Response

  1. Book Adams says:

    I’ve been using a NUC7PJYH with Ubuntu 18.04 as my daily driver for six months now.

    Intel Support Forum has long been a cruel joke played on us NUC owners. Just glance at their welcoming page with all these still-open complaints:

    https://communities.intel.com/community/tech/nuc

    I’ve been waiting for nucblog.net to bluntly expose this Intel embarrassment for the past two years. Publicly shame Intel into actually fixing all these known product defects.

    This recent CIR issue is just one of several serious still-open defects in recent NUCs. When is nucblog.net going to at least mention the memory “dual-channel” failures and HDR failures Olli?

    NUCs have been defective garbage for at least two years and because of this nucblog.net remains a ghost town.

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