Building an IR receiver device is intuitively easier and will be our first step towards learning IR communications using Arduino. For building a basic Infrared receiver device we will use the following parts:

• One Arduino Uno R3
• One USB cable
• One IR receiver (TSOP family of IR receivers)
• One pc. 1K Ohms resistor
• Some male-to-male jumper wires

In the following sections, we will see examples of two popular IR receivers from the TSOP family of IR receivers and the SM0038 IR receiver. The IR receivers have in-built circuitry for receiving and decoding the IR signals. No additional circuitry is required for decoding the received IR signals. All you need to do is plug in the proper breadboard connection with the Arduino.

The first example will be a detailed example. We will use the TSOP1738/TSOP1838 IR receiver to build an Arduino-based device to receive IR signals from any remote control. You can use this device to detect and read incoming IR signals from any remote control that operates at a frequency of 38 KHz. Most remote controls that are commonly used to control general electronic gadgets like car DVD players, room light, robotic vehicles and so on use 38 KHz and should work with this example.

The second example will be a short guidance on using the SM0038 IR receiver to receive 38 KHz IR signals. You can use this receiver with almost any remote control lying around the house. In this case, we will reuse the sketch from the first example. The only change will be in the pin out of the SM0038 IR receiver.

Both these examples are quite similar to one another, the only difference being the IR receiver pin outs. These examples have been chosen to demonstrate the versatility of using the Arduino platform with different families of IR receivers.