Even though some devices now use WiFi and Bluetooth, so much of our home entertainment equipment still relies on its own proprietary infrared remote control. By and large (when you can find them) they work fine, but what happens when they stop working? First port of call is to change the batteries, of course, but once you’ve tried that what do you do next? [Hulk] has your back with this simple but effective IR Remote Tester / Decoder.
By using a cheap integrated IR receiver/decoder device (the venerable TSOP4838), most of the hard work is done for you! For a quick visual check that your remote is sending codes, it can easily drive a visible LED with just a resistor for a current-limit, and a capacitor to make the flickering easier to see.
For an encore, [Hulk] shows how to connect this up to an Arduino and how to use the “IRremote” library to see the actual data being transmitted when the buttons are pressed.
It’s not much of a leap to imagine what else you might be able to do with this information once you’ve received it – controlling your own projects, cloning the IR remote codes, automating remote control sequences etc..
It’s a great way to make the invisible visible and add some helpful debug information into the mix.
We recently covered a more complex IR cloner, and if you need to put together a truly universal remote control, then this project may be just what you need.
Or, grab pretty much any phone camera, open the camera program and point the camera lens at the remote control as you press the buttons… you’ll see the LED on the phone’s screen flash since the CCD is partially sensitive to IR.
While a dedicated device like this is a great option, you might find you already possess a device capable of telling you this information on your person already.
Not iPhone, they have good filter and you won’t see anything.
On the iPhone just use the front camera – it does not have such a
good IR filter.
Some iPhones don’t have the IR filter on the front-facing camera.
my iphone 13 (faintly) shows the IR led flickering on both back- and front camera. If you do the check in a dark environment there is not problem to see if the remote id still working
Just use your phone camera,it will see the infrared fron the emitting leds if they’re working
What about the decoding bit?
Well, this seems very interesting, I don’t think an IR remote controller can do that, But let’s see if actually works.
Look up JP1 remotes. There was a brand of universal remotes that had a 6 pin 0.1″ pin header (or holes to solder one) inside the battery compartment. For many of them it was possible to make a parallel port programming cable from a DB25 connector, some wires from a floppy or hard drive cable, a couple of resistors and a 6 pin IDC. Later remotes required a slight more complicated programming cable, and schematics were provided for LPT and USB.
There was a custom Excel spreadsheet one could use to create the data to upload to JP1 remotes to make them operate equipment for which they didn’t have data pre-programmed.
If you had a learning remote with JP1 you could save the data from another remote then remap it how you wanted. My contribution was getting the data from a remote for a fancy stereo receiver that had a ton of AV input and outputs, but was made circa 1995 or 1996. For that brand, none of the universal remotes supported any model made prior to 1997 – when a DVD input was added to their entire product line and the manufacturer changed most of the data the remotes sent out.
I might still have some 2k rom chips around from when I used to upgrade those. Some of the DirecTV remotes were also JP1.
I really miss my Galaxy Note4 IR blaster. I had an app that would just do any codes. Not be a full screen gory add I didn’t need for TV shows I’m never going to watch like the OEM bloatware.
It was great for turning down the TV at restaurants and getting grandma’s TV to some sane aspect ratios.
My Phone also has an IR Blastert, but the Xiaomi OEM App wants to get so much access rights, that I do not really want to use it.
Yeah it pisses me off that Samsung dropped the ir blaster in the Note series. I used it quite a bit.
search ebay for “L336 Universal Smart Remote Control With Learn Function” these are so cheap and can learn just about anything even different carrier frequency codes. maybe someone will reverse engineer this to find out how the Chinese do it…
I have something along this line on top of my workbench.
It’s an Arduino nano with and ir receiver and a 40×2 lcd display. It displays the raw, hex, and ASCII codes of any ir signal it receives.
Does the detected data contains the device’s (like a tv) code?
I’ve a no name tv that I want to program my universal remote to control it but I can’t find it’s code any where.