Oyvind's Circuit Tips: Fun with remote controls

This week I decided to try out a simple little circuit idea: Modify my electronic candles to turn on and off from any remote control.

My idea was made possible by this little fella:

An IR sensor from Vishay

Two of its pins are for power. The third pin is for data.

When you power it up, it detects when a button is pressed on any 38kHz IR remote control. The data pin is normally HIGH. But when a button press is detected, the decoded button code is sent as a train of HIGH and LOW pulses, like this:

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For this project, I don't care about button code. I just want to know whenever a button has been pushed. So I want to convert this train of pulses into one main "Button Has Been Pushed" pulse that I can use to turn my electronic candles on.

To do this you need a one-shot circuit.

...which you can easily build with a 555 timer:

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I've built and tested this, and it works great. I used an LED on the output, so I could test. Now, pushing a button on any IR remote turns on my LED for about 1 second.

(For those interested in testing it: I used 100k for R1 and 10 µF for C1)

Next up will be to use this output pulse to toggle my electronic candles. Hopefully, I'll have it ready by Thursday to give you an update.

If you're an Ohmify member, you can check out more details and see a video of the prototype over at the Show & Tell section in the community.

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Keep On Soldering!
Oyvind @ build-electronic-circuits.com

PS! If you're new to electronics - or trying to get back into it - Ohmify​ is for people like you who are interested in electronics and want to learn skills like soldering, using chips like the 555 timer, circuit design, Arduino, and much more - while also building practical projects along the way.

​Click here to learn more >>​

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