Any remote control for our PC
The possibility to control a PC with any remote control (also the old one recovered from the broken VCR!) is not a news, but it’s still unknown for many people.
Even if similar commercial offers are now many, comfortables and ready to be used, the old fashion do-it-yourself way is always great, and we can enjoy and save money building the little interface that you can see in the picture (mine is bad, I’ve no welding skills!). Spending a couple of Euros is sufficient to buy required components:
- a serial port connector (DSUB9 female), you can also grab it from an old mouse;
- a piece of cable, with two conductors and a wire;
- a random diode;
- a tension regulator ”78L05″;
- a 4.7 KOhm resistence;
- a 4.7 microFarad condensator;
- an infrared TSOP17xx sensor (they’re in any remote control receiver, I recovered one from a TV in the trash!)
and then you’ve to get a tin welder (and the tin 
) and a little piece of wafer where to build everything. Electric schemas to prepare this little interface are everything on the net, for example here.
After building it, you’ve to connect it to the PC and install a software to send commands to the PC. I suggest Girder, that is shareware: the 30 days trial is directly downloadable from the official site (take version 3, the “4″ is new and I’m not sure you can use it with this kind of interface). Then you need a Girder plugin, to translate infrared commands, the best I found is the Igor Cesko plugin (take normal “IgorPlug” version, not the “XP” one that needs a different receiver). The plugin must be configured with the COM port you’re using (usually 1 or 2) and “Input signal” in “DCD” mode; now you can begin to make Girder learn commands, adding them and telling Girder what to do, and then clicking on “Learn Event“ followed by the button on our remote control the we want to associate to it.
The use of Girder is not immediate, but you will find a lot of tutorials and forums that deeply speak about it. With some “training” of the PC it’s possible to execute near every operation with buttons on our remote