To test the IR receiver I found a neat piece of software called xoscope which turns you PC into a fully functional oscilloscope. You’re limited by the maximum sample rate of your sound card, but that is plenty for this particular test. So I plugged the receiver into the motherboard’s CD-in, went ahead and fired up the PC (the Gigabyte board that I’m using for the MediaBox is not in the TF5 case just yet), logged into Ubuntu and started xoscope using the following command in a terminal.
xoscope –D Soundcard
The moment of truth – I pressed a few buttons on the Sky+ remote, and what do you know, absolutely NOTHING. Not a sausage. This was a little disappointing to say the least. Not sure what was wrong, so I thought I’d try a different input. So I went ahead and butchered and old pair of headsets so that I could use the plug on the end. By this time I had butchered connectors and plugs all over the place. The headphone plug had a similar setup as with the CD-in except using a different plug. After inserting the plug into the line-in jack and pressing buttons on the Sky+ remote again, I was pleased to see it working. Yay! Here is what the signal looks like in xoscope.
The Sky+ remote uses the RC6 protocol; you can find some information on RC6 here. As you can see from the image, the leader pulse is present along with the remaining bits representing a single button press.
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Thanks for the circuit. What I wanted to know is whether this headset jack output style will work when plugging it into the remote control port of my TV Tuner. It is a Winfast TV2000 standard.
Brendan
I guess it all depends on the circuitry inside the Winfast TV2000 whether you could use the TSOP1736 as the source. I am almost certain you will not be able to receive data from the the IR port on the card using audio alsa though as it would not present it self to the system as a sound card. But that shouldn't matter since the Winfast TV2000 uses the BT878 chip, and it has a GPIO register which can be read which will have the scan codes from the IR port. You can use the LIRC 'lirc_gpio' driver to do this.