Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part II: Home Entertainment

Figure 5-1 shows the components of the project we’ll be

building in this chapter.

Project Overview

For this project, you’ll be building a serial port infrared

receiver using off-the-shelf parts you can pick up at your

local electronics hobby shop. Don’t worry if you don’t

fully understand how to read schematics—this will be

as simple as pie. However, if you’re still nervous or just

not interested in building the hardware yourself, you

can purchase a ready-made serial port IR receiver for

under $20.

The difficulty in this project is primarily found in build-

ing the hardware. That’s not to say that it will be diffi-

cult for everyone. If you have even rudimentary solder-

ing skills, building the simple circuit board should not

be any trouble. If you haven’t done much soldering but

you’re willing to make mistakes (and possibly purchase

the parts more than once), that skill can be acquired

during this process. And hey, you can probably see from

the pictures just how poor my soldering skills are, and I

still managed to make it work.

There are two versions of this project that rely on the

same home-brew receiver: one using Linux, the other

using Windows. For the Linux version, you’ll use open

source software to bring it to life. The Linux Infrared

Remote Control project (LIRC) began as a hardware/

softwa