IR Detector

Wednesday September 22nd 2004 09:51 AM PST

When i got home last night i screwed around for a little while making a good Infrared Detector. My early one was a joke. Just the IR detector connected to a phone plug, then plugged into my mixing board and the gain cranked all the way up. The amount of background noise was expected, and because of it, the thing didn't work worth shit. It did however let me hear IR light for the first time on my own home built apparatus. We do listen to light all the time, so its not shocking, but i'd never actually built something simple that would let me send and receive light. So, now how do i make the thing better? Well thats simple enough. Steal the components from something you know works. So i took one of my many old Macintosh Microphones, and cannibalized it for its hardware. I simply clipped the sound pickup component off the whole microphone assembly and replaced it with the IR detector. I was amazed at how easy is was, and how loud the sound was that was recorded. If you put the remote control directly next to the detector, the sound actually would end up clipping. So i got a couple good recordings of a power button off the remote and then fed them into the iPod and the little apparatus that i had built the other day. Well, no luck. I'm thinking now that the IR LED that i have is rated for a higher voltage that i need. That would mean that the iPod output would not be powerful enough to supply the cathode with enough power to trigger the TV. Either that, or i've just got the cathode connected to the wrong end of the phone plug. I'm gonna screw around with it a little more, but at least now i can record all the sound that i need to control the TV.