The INFRA-NINJA — A PC Remote Receiver

F3GULGEHTOUJI73.MEDIUM

Laziness sometimes spawns the greatest inventions. Making things to reduce effort on your part is quite possibly one of the greatest motivators out there. So when [Kyle] had to get out of bed in order to turn off Netflix on his computer… He decided to do something about it.

He already had an Apple remote, which we have to admit, is a nice, simple and elegant control stick — so he decided  to interface with it in order to control his non-Apple computer. He quickly made up a simple PCB up using the good ‘ol toner transfer method, and then populated it with a Bareduino, a CP2102 USB 2.0 to TTL UART 6PIN Serial Converter, an IR receiver, a USB jack, header pins, and a few LED and tactile switches.

It’s a bit tricky to upload the code (you have to remove the jumper block) but then it’s just a matter of connecting to it and transferring it over with the Arduino IDE. The Instructable is a bit short, but [Kyle] promises if you’re really interested he’ll help out with any questions you might have!

19 thoughts on “The INFRA-NINJA — A PC Remote Receiver

  1. Nice! Partly related question : has anyone seen plans for a small battery powered IR adapter? It would take input from your favorite remote (or phone with IR like recent Samsung galaxy phones) and output IR user set IR signals for some home device. You’d also need a way to record the IR codes for the target device. I know there are learnable multi remotes already of course. But with this idea ANY remote, with the design you like, could be used.

    1. Looking for the exact same thing!. Want to control my Roomba and AC (Winix air filter) unit to go into clean mode when I leave the house.

      Unfortunately they both use IR and a tether solution is also problematic. Small coincell IR/bluetooth LE gateway would be perfect.

  2. So the world goes around and the old ideas return. Some 15+ years ago IrMan was the solution for this: a relatively simple receiver plugged to serial port and the rest was then scripting.

    1. Yeah, that was in fact one my earlier projects: a TSOP-something plus a couple of simple components and a serial port connector in a free-form circuit. It worked fine with LIRC.

      Unfortunately nowadays most computers don’t have serial ports, so you need to emulate them using a µC.

      1. I’m beginning to wonder if most don’t, because they don’t bring the pins out to the back of the machine?

        I’ve been doing some motherboard window shopping (my main workstation is getting long in the tooth), and everything I have seen so far (I haven’t looked at everything, though – especially not the real “high end of wallet” stuff) seems to always have at least a serial port, and sometimes a parallel port, too!

        Even on the ones that don’t have it on the main rear panel, there is generally a header for it. For the parallel port, that seems much more rare today. One thing I have noticed is that on the mobos that do have ps/2 ports, those ports are now “combined” into a single port (like laptops used to be) – you can plug in a keyboard, or a mouse (and maybe both, if you have one of those old ps/2 laptop y-cables laying around!). The port is even split-colorized (half green, half purple)…

        I would imagine that LIRC would work with a virtual serial port – so all you would need would be some kind of serial-to-USB adaptor cable…

        1. Are you talking about a DE-9 male connector somewhere on the motherboard? Those things are rare in modern motherboards, and parallel ports doubly so.

          It really kind of sucks, because USB->Serial adapters are really hit and miss, but real serial is pretty much required if you’re doing anything with ancient hardware (or even new, $10,000 CNC machines).

        2. Are you talking about a DE-9 male connector somewhere on the motherboard? Those things are rare in modern motherboards, and parallel ports doubly so.

          It really kind of sucks, because USB->Serial adapters are really hit and miss, but real serial is pretty much required if you’re doing anything with ancient hardware (or even new, $10,000 CNC machines).

  3. Ever heard of LIRC? (if USB is a must: using FT232 should work, additional components required: a few caps, and the IR receiver…, see, e.g., http://www.huitsing.nl/irftdi)

    I begin to feel sick, whenever I see projects using *duino for jobs, which are a) solved a long time ago, and b) much simpler without it. But on the other hand, building something new from scratch provides insight, is fun, etc…. but, as I said, it sometimes seems unnecessary…

    1. If you’re going to feel sick every time someone doesn’t do things the exact best way, or even worse, the way that you would do it, then expect to feel sick a lot.

      For those of us without your vast knowledge, getting something done with what we do know works just fine thanks.

      If you are doing a one-off to solve a problem, what difference does using an arduino (or ) make? A couple of dollars? An extra 15 minutes in soldering? I’ve set up lirc in the past – during some of those times, I seriously thought it might be easier to write some custom code from scratch.

      Sure if you are mass producing a widget, spend a bunch of time wringing every last cent out of the design. But in this case? It really doesn’t matter.

      How about some kudos for him for buying one of the many off the shelf solutions as well as for documenting his experience? Or at least some constructive criticism instead of your belly-aching that it isn’t perfect.

  4. The jumper thing for programing is only because he did not bring the DTR-signal down from the cp2102 board. I do this on my breadbord arduinos with great succes.

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