Anyone made an IR blaster?

[StupaFly]

Supposedly you can get the parts at a local Radio Shack and throw a blaster together. Anyone done this? How difficult is it? Any schematics (for a regular Joe, not for an engineer please...)?

Andy

[smeghead]

In my opinion it's cheaper to buy one ready made than to buy the parts. Most of them use a microcontroller of some sort to decode the IR signals and translate them to something that the PC understands. I have a RedEye
http://www.redremote.co.uk/serial/index.html
that costs £28.50.

[dneprrider]

There are plenty of details on how to build your own IR blaster for the linux based MythTV using LIRC. If you use the plans for one of these serial port LIRC compatiable IR blasters then you can use WinLIRC & transmit.exe (see earlier posts in this forum concerning this) on a windows based PC. This is what I use with my GBPVR setup.

Check this link
http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/myt..._LIRC.html


It is fun to be able to play around with this and learn something in the process.

[stefan]

Ok, so for us not-so-handy, or at least with-not-so-much-time, has anyone tried the blasters provided by http://www.irblaster.info/ ? Would it be safe to assume that one of those would work with WinLIRC? The price seems reasonable.

[StupaFly]

Ok, so for us not-so-handy, or at least with-not-so-much-time, has anyone tried the blasters provided by http://www.irblaster.info/ ? Would it be safe to assume that one of those would work with WinLIRC? The price seems reasonable.

How programmable are these? I assume there are a bazillion (yes, a bazillion) different brands/models of external tuners out there.

Thx for the input so far!

[stefan]

Check this to see if someone has already configured your brand.
http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/

[wtg]

Ok, so for us not-so-handy, or at least with-not-so-much-time, has anyone tried the blasters provided by http://www.irblaster.info/ ? Would it be safe to assume that one of those would work with WinLIRC? The price seems reasonable.

I don't know, but I'm about to find out. I just ordered one.

[stefan]

I'm close to ordering one, too, if he delivers to Sweden. Let me know how yours work. :-)

[artbatista]

I'm close to ordering one, too, if he delivers to Sweden. Let me know how yours work. :-)

If the MCE 2005 remote is available at your locale, you may want to consider it. With GIRDER and the MCE2005 remote plugin, it can act as a remote as well as a IR Blaster.

It can control 2 STBs and the remote itself is comfortable and have a nice feaqture set.

The price is excellent (around US$38.00) and is very competitive with other solutions.

Cheers

Art

[stefan]

Thank's for the tip. I can find it here, but for US$53. Plus shipping an handling. Plus $19 for Girder. To me, $12 for the irblaster sounds better ;-)