Arduino IR Receiver : Arduino 16th Lesson of Arduino Tutorial

In the previous post, we have talk about how to measure distance using Ultrasonic sensor. Now you are at the moderate class robotics knowledge. It’s time to make some advanced project. In this post we are going to talk about how to receive signals from IR remote using IR receiver using Arduino. Let’s get started.

Basic explanation.

What is IR?

IR stands for Infrared Rays. Infrared’s wave length is between 780nm to 1µm in the spectrum. IR is used to communicate shortly, like changing channels in TV. You can see IR rays using your phone camera. Just turn on the phone camera and press the button of IR remote. You can see a purple color light transmitting from the IR remote.

What is spectrum?

Here is Electromagnetic Spectrum Image.

Spectrum is electromagnetic wave list. Visible light is about 0.4µm to 0.7 µm. So, according to this electromagnetic spectrum, you can’t see IR rays in your eyes.

Pin out and Circuit diagram.

This IR Receiver has 3 pins. Two of them are VCC and GND as before projects. You have to connect VCC to 5V and GND to Arduino’s GND. Then last pin is signal pin. I have connected it to 11^th pin of Arduino.

Below is the pinout of IR receiver.

Below is the circuit diagram.

Getting signals from IR remote.

In this code’s beginning we have to include IRremote library. You already know how to include libraries to Arduino. If you don’t know, go to this page and learn it. After including the library, I have created integer variable named decval. It’s for saving decoded IR signal. Then I created object for our pin. It means 11^th pin is named as “SoftEXS” you can use any name here. Then I created another object named “results” for making decoded results.

Inside the void setup, I have set the serial monitor’s baud rate to 9600. Second line of the void setup says “ready to get inputs” to IR receiver.

Inside the void loop, I have put if condition to get reading only if there is a signal. So, it only gets readings if you press any button. Without if condition, it’s printing zeros every time. Inside the if condition, I have assigned decoded signal to “decval” variable. Then in the next line, I created the output from serial monitor and in the last line of if condition, I put a command that says “ready for getting your next value”. Then I added 100 milliseconds delay to make the code smoother and that it.

Assign values to IR decoded signals.

You saw the outputs of this IR remote. They are not actual values. They are long numbers. So, you have to convert them to numbers. To do that, you have to create if function. Here is the code. You can understand this now.

If you have any question regarding to this, please comment below. We are here to help you. Share this website among your friends. Stay safe, good bye.