Infra-red (IR) remotes are great, unless you’re in a hackerspace that’s full of crazy blinking lights as well as random IR emissions of all kinds. Then, they’re just unreliable. Some wise people at Metalab in Vienna, Austria cut out the IR middle-man with a couple transistors as well as some audio software. They phone call the job HDMI Whisperer, as well as it’s a adorable hack.
Metalab’s AV system has a web-frontend to ensure that nobody ever has to stand up unless they want to. They purchased an extremely affordable 5-to-1 HDMI switch to switch between showing several video streams. however exactly how to link the switch to the Raspberry Pi server?
Fortunately, the specific switch has a remote-mounted IR receiver that links to the primary system with a stereo audio jack. Plugging this sensor into a laptop as well as running Audacity while pressing the buttons on the remote got them audio data that play the remote’s codes. just playing these back out of the Raspberry Pi’s audio out as well as into the switch’s IR input with a small transistor circuit does the trick. now they have a networked five-way HDMI switch for $10.
Given the low data rates of many IR remotes, we might envision utilizing the exact same technique for gadgets that have built-in IR receivers as well. just clip out the IR receiver as well as solder in a couple wires as well as then inject your “audio” signal directly.
But IR hacks are tons of fun. We’ve seen a lot here, from the traditional video camera shutter-release hack to a much more general tutorials on cloning IR signals with Arduinos.
Thanks [overflo] for the tip!