The universal infrared receiver is a clone of the commercial available IR-Man. It is a small device that allows you to control your PC with the remote from your TV, VCR, CD or Stereo. I specially use it to control Winamp from anywhere in my room. The winamp-plugin Ties Bos wrote allows you to define exactly which keys on your remote you want to use for Winamp.

The hardware has been tested with over 40 different brands of remotes. They all work.

You need some microcontroller knowledge and soldering experience to build one yourself.

As you can see my PCB is single layer and can be very simple.      The bottom black component is a SFH506-36, an infra red receiver and demodulator  from siemems. Interface connects to serial port. If yours  is   located in the back of the machine you may try to use the remote by reflection of a white wall. Of course a simple straight-through serial cable allows you to put the device anywhere you want.

These schematic was drawn by Peter Lieven. All RS232 pins are labelled as seen from the PC side. In these schematic a 2 pin crystal is used instead of a resonator. With a three-legged resonator you don't need the two 15pF capacitors. It's up to you to choose use crystal or resonator.

These schematic was drawn by me. It is just an adaptation from the above to use a 16F84 instead of a 12C509. I'm currently using this one as I couldn't found in time the 12c509 on local stores.

    The device connects to one of your serial ports. It doesn't need any external power as it uses some of the unneeded serial port wires. The interface protocol is described on the interface page.

Some notes on the schematics:

    On original PCB a 4u7 capacitor was used between pin 1 and 8 of IC1. This somewhat balances the load on RTS and DTR which are used to power the whole thing. It should not be made too big though as it increases the time needed between powering down and up (i.e. quickly closing and restarting winamp will not work then).
    The external resonator is not always needed. If you're only going to use the thing at room temperature, the internal RC oscillator will run fine (please note: The 16C84 does NOT have an internal oscillator).
    As one can see from the schematics the RS232 transmission line toggles between 0V and +5V. This somewhat limits the maximal length of the cable you can use. It should work fine with about 2 meters of unshielded wires.
    For the two diodes from RTS and DTR you can use pretty much any you have around (probably 1N4148s).