IR Remote As PC Input

As a learning experience [GeriBoss] put together an IR remote control receiver board for his PC. His want of volume control from across the room was reason enough to undertake the project, and he got to work with a 38 kHz receiver module and Manchester encoding in the process.

The decoder portion of the project is built around an ATtiny2313 chip. The external interrupt pin (INT0) is connected to a TSOP31238. When it decodes a valid remote code it pushes a character to the RS232 chip connecting to the computer’s serial port.

We think this is a wonderful accomplishment for [GeriBoss], but we encourage him to refine the design further. You’ll notice in the image there’s a USB port on the board which is only used to provide regulated power. We know it’s possible to use V-USB with the ATtiny2313 to add USB functionality and this would be a great way to learn about it. We’d also like to mention the resistor and capacitor suggested for filtering the IR receiver module signal. We’ve included the recommended application schematic for that part after the break.

13 thoughts on “IR Remote As PC Input

  1. Wow. Isn’t this “hack”-a-day? Who are you guys, his mom?

    It’s kind of ridiculous (and insulting) to show off someone else’s project and then “finish” it for him.

    1. But it’s ok for commentators to make suggestions? Seems like a double-sided standard. I for one would welcome any constructive input for improvement of projects I publish.

      But back to the post itself: definitely slick, though I’d want to see USB functionality as well. I suspect the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is going to apply here. Still, it’d be nice to see it implemented.

    1. I’ve been using LIRC (Linux IR remote control) for years on my laptop works great, ironically I’ve found the windows port of LIRC to work much better for setting a system up, it would figure out the encoding and present the codes as a binary string, as opposed to leaving it as a bunch of high/low timmings

  2. Interesting enough I was wanting to embed an IR remote into my computer so I can have control of my stereo and tv. I was planning to make shortcuts of each script to load (e.g. vol up) and macro it to my G510. I was just hoping to find a usb ir transmitter, but all there is a usb ir transceiver for around $50. So I’m using my old psphat atm.

    1. NO, you can get an IR receiver and transmitter setup for $25.00 Look for the Microsoft Windows Media center remote and receiver. the old out of date one will also transmit IR to two devices as well.

  3. I did something close with an arduino, an IR receiver and an ethernet shield. The received IR signal is send via UDP on a specifed port on my PC. It is then received by a client writen in C. The client perform actions accordingly to a xml configuration file. Actions available are any combination of the folowings:
    send a key press event to the system keyboard buffer,
    send a key release to the same buffer,
    launch a program with any argument
    wait for XXX ms (to wait for the complet start of a program)

    PS: I am aware that this is a huge security hole…

  4. AFAIK pc serial ports either already have irda modems that can be enabled in bios (and then you can just use emitter/detector diodes) or you can just stick one of those irda modulators/demodulators in there.

  5. Of course I gave up on V-USB, I tried for weeks without success. Windows (7, x64) detected it but I couldn’t establish a data link… So the problem was on the PC side, not the firmware.

    In my opinion building this from scratch was much more satisfying than using (Win)LIRC or similar.

    I’ll probably use an FTDI chip next time, less hassle.

    Anyway, thanks for the feedback and suggestions everyone!

  6. We’d also like to mention the resistor and capacitor suggested for filtering the IR receiver module signal. We’ve included the recommended application schematic for that part after the break.

    You could as well have looked at it then, you know. Or read the text.

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