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My Pi IR remote Control
Controlling my Pi from bed.
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My Pi IR remote control
I installed the Raspbmc media player on an SD card. My son Steven had shown me how his worked with his TV's remote. Unfortunately, the TV I wanted to use it with lacked the HDMI loop back that is required for this to work.
I did a little research on the net, and found it wasn't hard to add a Infra Red sensor to the Pi. The IR sensor can connect directly to the PI. The LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) software is already loaded on RaspBMC; and I could just use one of the left over remote controls we have from old gear.
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The first thing was to get the sensor. The sensor can connect straight to the Pi, I only needed to find the right one. I needed one that would work with the 3.3v of the Pi. The ones from Jaycar are 5v, so no good for the Pi. I found Element14 sold sensors that worked in the correct range of volts. The other consideration was what carrier frequency they use. A bit more research seemed to indicate that 38 kHz was the most common; so I took a punt and got 2 x TSSP4038. I lashed out and got 2 only because they are all of $2.60 each.
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Wiring up the sensor for tesing was as easy as. The sensor does't require any other supporting electronics; so I just grab 3 male to male jumpers from my breadboarding kit, plugged each directly onto a pins on the sensor, and the other ends directly onto the appropriate pins on the Pi. A number of web tutorials on this.
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For the Remote Control, I had several left around from old equipment we no longer use. I picked one from an old Dick Smith set top box, it looked best suited, but most remotes seem to have mostly the same types of buttons anyway.
With the hardware in place for testing purposes, I followed the guide at https://learn.adafruit.com/using-an-ir-remote-with-a-raspberry-pi-media-center/lirc . I used the irrecord program as described in the 'Using Other Remotes' section to configure for my chosen remote. This worked with no hic-ups. Now I had a functioning set-up.
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All that remained now was to bring it together into its final form. I saw some examples where the sensor had been left dangling on the end of a cable. I suppose this could be good if you wanted to have the Pi hidden somewhere with just the sensor showing, but I wanted a more intergrated approach. I decided to solder female pin sockets onto the legs of the IR sensor, and bend these legs to fit directly onto the Pi pins. In previous uses of the Pi media box, it generally sat naturally length wise with the HDMI cable sitting out the back, as the HDMI is the heaviest and stiffest; so I decided to put the sensor to the opposite side. I bent the pins to form a side on 'S' shape, with the legs from the sensor going as low as possible, before bending back up and over the top of the GPIO pins.
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Next was to modify the case to fit over the sensor legs. I marked up where I wanted the new cut-out to be, drilled out the top and cut up the sides to make a slot. .
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Clip on the newly modified case, and we're done!.
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This is a magnifier test.