There are lots of smart home systems that will let you blast your older dumb appliances with infrared to control them. However, many are tied to ugly cloud systems that can frustrate you on a regular basis. [Steelcuts] whipped up a cloudless solution to this problem instead.
IR2MQTT does pretty much exactly what it says in the name. It allows integrating things like air conditioners and televisions into a Home Assistant setup with the use of an IR blaster and a neat, tidy web app. You use it with an ESP32 or ESP8266 running a firmware based on ESPHome to actually do the IR blasting. In turn, IR2MQTT is a back-end plus a web interface that lets you setup all your IR devices without having to manually capture IR codes and create YAML files to do everything. It’s also integrated with large databases of IR codes for common appliances so in many cases, you can just look up your gear and get it working the easy way.
Sometimes all you need to get the job done is an IR LED and the will to use it. If you’re cooking up your own infrared hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.
Worth noting that ESPHome and Home Assistant have recently integrated IR (and now RF) as a first class citizen in HA, with an ESPHome IRProxy device carrying the input and output duties.
https://esphome.io/components/ir_rf_proxy/
Years ago now, but I remember carefully soldering wires to a universal remote, so it could receive button presses via a microcontroller and a few daisy chained shift registers. The TV sending it’s audio to my hi-fi, a few buttons for initiating macros, starting freeview, vcr or dvd settings for volume, etc. I even experimented with having it close the curtains and dim the lights before switching them off. I was going to have it schedule recordings via a computer but technology caught up before I got around to it.
Back when TV-B-Gone was popular, I built a universal remote shaped like a sonic screwdriver. I wrote an Arduino library that used the data from LIRC. Managed to fit several hundred basic (volume, channel, mute and power) remotes on one attiny84. I’ll have to dig out the code and post it somewhere.