Ashish Adhikari's Simple Infrared Receiver Aims to Speed Diagnosis of Your Faulty Remotes
With an IR receiver, batteries, and an LED, you can easily figure out if your old remotes still work — and an Arduino helps, too.
Engineer Ashish Adhikari has put together a guide to figuring out exactly what's wrong with that TV remote sat in your drawer — by capturing and decoding its signals, with or without an Arduino microcontroller to help.
"What do you generally do when your remote controls starts playing up," Adhikari asks, rhetorically. "Do you generally use a multimeter and check the voltage and current produced by the battery? Or do you point the remote control to a digital camera and try to visualize the infrared light?"
Adhikari's approach is different: building a simple circuit, powered by AA batteries, which captures the infrared emissions from the remote's LED and translates it to a visible-light LED — providing a means to see exactly what's going on when you push a button, no multimeter or camera required.
The basic version of the circuit is built around a Vishay TSOP4838 38kHz infrared receiver, which is wired to the battery and an LED. When the receiver picks up a signal, the LED lights up — and as the transmission is pulsed to tell the receiving equipment what to do, the LED pulses too.
For those who want to dig deeper, Adhikari offers an extended version of the diagnostic tool — adding an Arduino Uno and the example sketch provided with the IRremote library to decode the incoming signals and print the result to the serial console.
Anyone wanting to build the project themselves, with or without Arduino Uno, can follow Adhikari's Instructables tutorial.