IR Keyboard
creative
technology
It drives me batty trying to search for something on the YouTube or Netflix apps on our TV with the remote control. It always seems that I’ll notice a misspelling or a missing space in a long line of text and trying to correct it is painful.
Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, to be able to use a full-sized keyboard and my superior typing skills. That thought led me to build the IR Keyboard. I can type out my full search text and let the machine go through the tedious process of left arrow, left arrow, down arrow enter until the search term is complete.
The IR keyboard rig is powered by a Teensy microcontroller, which can be programmed from the Arduino IDE. Once I found the proper IR codes for my LG TV I was off and running with the IR Remote Library.
I was fortunate to be able to buy a brand new PS/2 Keyboard, since there is a library the Teensy can use to interface with it. I wired up a PS/2 jack, a 40×2 LCD, an IR LED and mounted it all in a project box.
IR can be difficult to work with because it is one-way communication with no feedback. Timing the sending of remote codes takes some trial and error but I was able to get it working reliably.
The code is available on GitHub.