Topic: IR Transmitter on IREXT connector

Hi there,

It would be really useful to have an IR transmitter diode to use chumby as my TV REMOTE controller, this way It would be really easy to replace the original TV remote and always use the smartphone even to change channels.

Taking a look at the schematics it seems to be a plausible option... somebody experimenting on this area?

Thank you.

Re: IR Transmitter on IREXT connector

There's been a thought of taking the blue LED connected to the FPGA and replacing it with an IR LED. This would allow the FPGA to directly modulate the IR LED and have it function as a transmitter.

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Re: IR Transmitter on IREXT connector

What about the IRext connector? Theres a GPIO directly connected, I have to dig more on the specs, but what about a kernel driver to create a "bitbang" encoding on this pin? I'm not sure if this is possible or not smile

Re: IR Transmitter on IREXT connector

It should be possible.  The IR receiver is already a "bitbang" receiver, as it's just a sensor hooked up to a GPIO.

I have a LIRC driver somewhere in my development tree.  It created a kernel module that allowed the IR sensor to be used with LIRC.  Unfortunately, while I could record data using "mode2", I wasn't ever able to "train" the remote to ever work.  The LIRC documentation isn't very good at all for developers who want to add drivers.

A corresponding "transmit" driver should be equally easy (or hard) to write, especially since all the GPIOs are hooked up to the Linux kernel GPIO system.

The one caveat is that the IR extender physically switches off the internal IR sensor.  So you can only have one or the other.  Still, if you wanted, you could in theory replace the sensor with a LED and create an IR blaster.