Understanding and using infrared signals from a remote control via an Arduino and an IR sensor

The used infrared light sensor

In the previous articles on measuring IR pulses and controlling equipment with an IR LED we learnt how our Arduino can help us retreiving the pulses from a remote control and using in later together with an infrared light source. Now we want to understand how the code works, so that we can set up our own machine that can be controlled with an infrared remote control. For this we have to have a closer look on the pulse sequence and how infrared equipment communicates.

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A successful way to control infrared equipment via an Arduino and an infrared LED

Controlling and LED-stripe with IR light

This is the second part of my little tutorial on how to measure an IR pulse sequence from a remote control (see this article) and then copy and send this sequence to control equipment like a TV, a lamp or other IR equipment. The adarfuit.com website gives us once more a possible way on how to implement this, but in the following article we want to discuss on how to make it easier and again somehow more convenient in many cases. We can easily use the comma-separated values we got from our pulse measurements from the previous article to control the LED and output the needed 38 kHz signal sequence.

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A different way to use an IR sensor and the Arduino microcontroller to measure infrared pulses/signals

Arduino UNO - like microcontroller

With a microcontroller board like the Arduino UNO and a simple infrared light sensor you can read the signals and used pulse sequences from an IR remote control. Probably you've been looking at this website from adafruit.com already, so did I at the beginning. But I didn't want to believe that bypassing the board and using cryptic byte-commands is the only way to measure short pulses in the range of few microseconds, and in the following I will show you how to do the pulse measuring in a more understandable yet potentially more precise way. Among others we use the pulseIn() and the micros() function. See how to use the resulting pulse sequence to control IR equipment in this following article. If you want to control your arduino with an available IR remote, check this blogpost.

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