Rhys Goodwin

This is/was one of my blogs. Just a few bits and pieces - IT, woodwork, metalwork, electronics, DIY, technology articles and anything else I might be currently interested in and get around to documenting.

There might be some broken things because this site was converted roughly from Wordpress to jekyll.

My main area of interest these days is political party innovation which I’m building a project for at oneaction.nz

1 minute read

A couple of months ago I bought a secondhand Yamaha receiver (RX-V371). My plan was to finally do away with infrared blasters stuck to the outside of all my home theater gear. The plan was to do all the control with HDMI CEC. I was already controlling my TV using the Kwikwai HDMI CEC adapter which I reviewed a couple of posts ago.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the necessary Yamaha HDMI CEC commands to control things like surround mode and DSP settings. Chances are these commands just don’t exist. I did email Yamaha but they didn’t even respond. The most I could get out of CEC on the Yamaha was power on/off and input select.

I couldn’t bring myself to stick an IR blaster to the beautiful face of this fine receiver. Equally unappealing was the idea of shelling out cash for a receiver with Ethernet or RS-232 control.

Here is my compromise – putting the IR blaster inside the receiver. It’s not rocket science but here you go:

After locating the IR sensor I removed the self-adhesive backing on the IR blaster and stuck it to the PCB with the aid of a bamboo skewer.

The only thing left to do was to cut the the 3.5mm mono plug off the blaster, pass the cable through a small hole at the back of the receiver and then re-attach the 3.mm mono plug using a soldering iron and some heat-shrink tubing.

The Infrared emitter (blaster) is connected to a Microsoft USB Infrared Receiver/Transmitter. I’m using my own home brew c# .NET application to do the automation but there are a number of options, Girder, HIP, EventGhost etc.

The result – a reasonable level of control, no ugly IR bug visible (I can’t even see it flashing) and zero cost.

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