New Toy: Dual Headed IR-Blaster

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m (1) pretty useless when it comes to electronics and soldering and stuff, and will resort to DIY in that area only when desperate and (2) pretty lazy to go drive all the way to Pasar Road, and walk from shop-to-shop asking for things that I have no clue about. Hence, if there’s a chance to just click-click-click without leaving the house, I’ll go that way.

So my new toy arrived today.

This is a dual-headed IR blaster, that plugs into my PC’s serial port, and is driven by the LIRCD software. The LIRCD software lights up the infrared LED on the end of the blaster and a particular frequency that matches your remote control, thus allowing the computer to control your elelectronic devices.

Why is this dual-headed? Well, it has TWO LEDs that light up at the same time, so you can use it to control two devices. The same frequencies are transmitted to both devices, but usually each device will only respond to their own frequencies.

So now I can control both my Astro and UniFi set top boxes!

Ordered it at http://www.irblaster.info/index.html#RS232_IR, 13 days to ship from US.

Next Project: Re-organize my MythTV channel numbering. Most likely I’ll do 4-digit numbers in case there’s a clash between Astro and UniFi IPTV channel numbering. So 1xxx is astro, an 2xxx is UniFi. Pity there’s only two more weeks of free UniFi TV.

This post was originally published as a Facebook Note at 2010-10-15 19:01:42 +0800.