To know ones enemy…

I have been corresponding with A Very Smart Man named Tom that wrote the tutorials on how to get my WebPal keyboard working with MythTV. Throughout our conversations, it has become apparent that a few assumptions that I made about the setup were incorrect.

Through Tom’s infinite patience, I have learned that I will in fact need to either purchase or construct a serial IR receiver. The one he has pictured on his site hooks in through an internal serial port. He has a schematic on how to build it on his website with a parts list. I have consulted the documentation on my motherboard and the only thing that I can find that looks similar to this port is called COM2 on my motherboard documentation. I think that this is an internal serial connector but I am not sure.

I have given Tom the necessary documentation and posed this question to him, if it is in fact another serial port ready for action I’m going to make this my first “build your own electronics” project to whip up this circuit to read IR signals.

The bonus to all of this is that my new Hitachi remote supposedly communicates over IR, so I should be able to record a set of timings and commands to actually be able to control the whole nine yards from one remote. I’m not sure I want to, but it might be neat to have the option.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I go through all of this effort. Without all of the trials involved in building my MythTV, I would never know things like how to build a driver from source, how an infrared remote works, and possibly very soon how a IR receiver is constructed.