How to Use IR Remotes with Arduino (Current and Updated)

Electronics:

• Arduino
• Any IR remote
• IR receiver
• Breadboard
• Jumper Cables
• LED

And here is the Make-To-Learn contest questions! – don’t forget to vote!

What did you make?
Well I didn’t make anything specific in this instructable but it is more of a guide to how to make your other projects ‘wireless’.
My projects works by taking TV remotes and other remotes, converting their signals to numbers, and using them.

How did you make it?
I’ve been working on trying to use IR remotes. All the tutorials I found didn’t really put the all the bits and pieces together for me. My main goal was to make an easy tutorial for others to follow.

Where did you make it?
At my computer. I am now able to control my robots and other stuff, like lights and lighting. For instance, I could make it so that whenever I hit the play button on my DVD player remote, the lights in the room dim, or go out.

What did you learn?
My biggest challenge was finding a IR decoder that worked, and then finding installing the proper library.

Step 2: Downloads

TV Remotes, CD player remotes, heater remotes, DVD player remotes, all those remotes! Many people just have old remotes laying around because they item that the went to broke. I have collected quite a few remotes over the past week. I just asked all my friends if they had any old remotes laying around and sure enough I collected about 7 of them. So finding a remote isn’t very hard. I good option if you want a professional looking one is to buy the specialty MP3 player remote. I have one because it came with my Arduino kit.

Here are a few good cheap remotes that you can get.

• https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10280
• http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10001_10001_2152315_-1
• And even Dollar General has cheap, universal remotes!!

Step 4: Installing the IR Library

The very first thing that we need to do associating with Arduino is to download the IR library. Now just about every tutorial directed you to Github, but it took me forever to find out how to even download it. Then even after is was downloaded, it wasn’t named properly. So, to make things simpler, I have included a .zip of the IR library. Download it to your computer, unzip it, then place it in your Arduino libraries folder. Don’t know where it is?

Open up the Arduino IDE and on the menu select Sketch>Import Library>Add Library and select the ‘IRremote’ folder. If you are on a PC you need to delete the mac content within the IRremote folder.

For resources here is the Github
https://github.com/shirriff/Arduino-IRremote

Here is the IR remote folder

http://www.mediafire.com/download/jd5j7911amju36g/IRremote.zip

Step 5: Recognizing IR Signals

/*
 Some Sample code of how to use your IR remote

 * Lets get started:

 The IR sensor's pins are attached to Arduino as so:
 Pin 1 to Vout (pin 11 on Arduino)
 Pin 2 to GND
 Pin 3 to Vcc (+5v from Arduino)

*/

#include <IRremote.h>

int IRpin = 11;  // pin for the IR sensor
int LED = 13;    // LED pin  
IRrecv irrecv(IRpin);
decode_results results;

boolean LEDon = true; // initializing LEDon as true

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
  irrecv.enableIRIn(); // Start the receiver
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() 
{

  if (irrecv.decode(&results)) 
    {

      irrecv.resume();   // Receive the next value
    }

   if (results.value == 0)  // change zero to your IR remote button number
     {
       if (LEDon == true)   // is LEDon equal to true? 
         {
           LEDon = false;   
           digitalWrite(LED, HIGH);
           delay(100);      // keeps the transistion smooth

         }

        else
          {
            LEDon = true;
            digitalWrite(LED, LOW);
            delay(100);

          }

     }

}

if (results.value == 0)  // change zero to your IR remote button number

if (results.value == 16753245)

So what if we want each button on the remote to do a different function? Making a lot of ‘if’ statements would be way too much typing! So lets simplify this with a switch/case statement.

switch(results.value)

We are going to put this after the void loop and after the first if statement. Here’s the whole thing-

void loop() 

  if (irrecv.decode(&results)) 
    {
      irrecv.resume();   // Receive the next value
    }

  switch(results.value)
   {

So now we need finish the code. If you don’t know what the switch/case are see http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/SwitchCase
Here is the final code. You can keep on adding cases. Now where it says ‘case 03′ you change the ’03’ to whatever button number you wish. For instance, the first case could say:

case 16753245: // do this break;

And we just keep on adding different button numbers for to do different things.

Here is the link to the code below.

/*
 Some Sample code of how to use your IR remote

 * Lets get started:

 The IR sensor's pins are attached to Arduino as so:
 Pin 1 to Vout (pin 11 on Arduino)
 Pin 2 to GND
 Pin 3 to Vcc (+5v from Arduino)

*/

#include <IRremote.h>

int IRpin = 11;  // pin for the IR sensor
int LED = 13;    // LED pin  
IRrecv irrecv(IRpin);
decode_results results;

boolean LEDon = true; // initializing LEDon as true

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
  irrecv.enableIRIn(); // Start the receiver
  pinMode(LED, OUTPUT);