PS3 IR Dongle Tamed For Use With A Linux Box

So a man walks into a Radio Shack and the clerk says “Why the long face?”. No, that’s not it. [Ms3fgx] walks into a Radio Shack and says “holy crap, that PS3 IR dongle is only two bucks”. He’s been looking for an IR remote receiver to use with a Linux machine and decided to bend this PS3 dongle to his will. It’s a lot less expensive that the parts to build the simplest IR receivers like this FTDI cable version, or a microcontroller based receiver.

He plugged it in and was delighted to find that it enumerates. The kernel has PlayStation 3 controller support built-in and has no problem picking up this device. When he uses ‘cat’ to display the incoming data all he gets is repetitive garbage. This is because the dongle only supports Sony remote control codes. But after a bit of universal remote setup, he’s got unique commands for each button. The last piece of the puzzle is to map the controller commands to keyboard keys. This is done with the QJoyPad package, but there are a myriad of ways to remap these buttons so go with what you know.

9 thoughts on “PS3 IR Dongle Tamed For Use With A Linux Box

  1. I picked one of these up a while back too! Don’t get excited, opening them you find nothing but a potted die, so you cant really identify or have any fun with whatever chip it uses. it does have pads breaking out the pins, if you really do feel brave…

  2. I picked up some of these a while back for the same reason. A little before that I also picked up some of the gigaware ps3 remote/dongle combinations for $5. That worked too but the dong’e that came with the gigaware dongle isn’t very good. So I use the gigaware remote the auvio dong’e and the gigware remote is now responsive and doesn’t seem to send multiple clicks when I don’t want.

  3. I picked one of these up as well and was thinking of picking more up before they sell out if I could find a good hack for them. As stated, inside is nothing more than a potted die and IR receiver, but I also wondered if the case would be usable for any small compact USB dongle (dongly?) projects.

  4. Picked up one of these for about $1 at radioshack a few months ago, then dropped it into a drawer. I figured someone would figure out how to use it eventually. I was right!

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