When I noticed this compact IR Keyboard was on sale for no more than 1.- € I had no choice but to order a couple. One of them might prove useful when I manage to set up a media center based on a Raspberry Pi some day.

Of course, this keyboard comes without a receiver. But how hard could it be to get it to work with LIRC? Very hard, as it turns out. Fortunately, I wasn’t the first one to encounter this problem. There is an open source decoder for this keyboard targeting AVR microcontrollers and I had just come up with the idea to combine it with the V-USB stack to create a USB receiver when I found out that someone else had already done just that.

The circuit was easily set up on a breadboard, but the firmware needed a few minor modifications to compile with recent versions of avr-gcc. When those were done and the firmware flashed, the operating system would still refuse to accept the circuit as a valid HID device. It took me quite a while to figure out that the author had made and committed some changes that seemingly broke the USB stack. When I reverted to an earlier version, the device worked fine. My clone of the repository is available on Github and its master branch now holds the still working version of the firmware.

Then I created a compact board to hold all the component. It has a single sided layout with only a few jumper wires on the top side and I used the toner transfer method for etching. The result did not turn out very pretty but it does the job. Unfortunately, in the first version of my design I missed R3 so the images on the gallery show a quick-fix for that problem. The board also features a 10 pin connector for the ISP since the firmware will probably still require more work. I added the revised EAGLE files to the repository.

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