Sharing an IR receiver via an opto-isolator

I wanted to share an infrared remote receiver between the Pace DC550D cable box and Raspberry Pi 2 B running Kodi. This way there is no need to mount another visible IR receiver. It turned out to be a harder than anticipated because I used the wrong opto-isolator.

IR Receivers

An IR receiver has 3 connections: ground, power and signal output. With many IR receivers, the output is open collector and active low. This means when there is no remote signal detected, the output is not driven, and when a signal is detected, it is driven low. In order to actually see a voltage change at the output, a pull-up resistor is needed. Then the output stays high with no signal and goes low when a signal is detected.

The Pace DC550D, like many devices, connects to the IR receiver via a standard headphone jack. The tip supplies 5 V power, the ring (middle contact) is the signal output, and the sleeve is ground. This arrangement makes the most sense, but I don't know if every other device uses it.

The signal stays at just over 3 V normally and goes low when IR is detected. This might be because it connects to 3.3 V device. With an open collector output, the pull-up resistor does not need to connect to the same voltage as the device's power supply. So, an IR receiver powered by 5 V and with the pull-up resistor connected to 3.3 V will properly interface with 3.3 V devices.

Opto-isolation

Accessing the IR receiver signal is easy via headphone splitter and headphone plug. It ought to be possible to connect the IR receiver directly to the Raspberry Pi. Everything is grounded together via HDMI, though also connecting grounds would be good. However, I wanted opto-isolation for protection.

I connected the opto-isolator LED between 5 V power and signal output. This meant the LED would come on when a signal is detected. This seems better because it is drawing power through the IR receiver output, not the pull-up resistor. Though there is a problem because the off state is just over 3 V and LED voltage drop is only 1 V. I added 3 diodes in series to deal with this. A current limiting resistor is also required for the LED.

At first I tried to just connect the opto-isolator output to ground and a GPIO pin, and use the Raspberry Pi's internal pull-up. First, this did not work at all, because the lirc_rpi module parameter for setting that is ignored. Pull up can either be enabled by running a short Python program every time, or by by adding a dtparam=gpio_in_pull=up line after the dtoverlay=lirc-rpi line in /boot/config.txt. With the pull-up enabled, I got a signal, but it was useless.

The problem was the turn-off time of the optocoupler. I chose a TIL113 with photodarlington output, so that I would need to draw less power from the IR receiver. However, photodarlington opto-isloators have very slow shutoff. Adding a base resistor didn't help much, and even with a pull-up to 3.3 V on the output, LIRC was unreliable. Eventually I changed to a PS2010 with a just a normal phototransistor. Due to its much lower current transfer ratio, I had to carefully choose LED current limiting and output pull-up resistors. The output pull-up was still necessary; the Raspberry Pi's internal pull-up did not give a good enough signal.

The Results

This seems fully reliable now. I'm using a Harmony 300 remote, with the device set to Microsoft Media Player [Microsoft Xbox Media Center Extender]. It maps to the mceusb LIRC remote. The MyHarmony software doesn't configure all the possible keys, so it is necessary to edit the key configuration. The Prev button, corresponding to KEY_BACK is especially important for the Kodi interface.