While channel surfing might increasingly seem to be a thing of the past, Kevin Darrah demonstrates that it’s possible to control your streaming computer with a traditional TV remote. 

His simple solution reads IR signals with an IR detector module, which can then be passed along and translated into USB keypresses for computer control.

You can see his experimental Arduino Leonardo setup in the video below, which takes advantage of the board’s ATmega32U4 chip to emulate USD keyboard functions directly.

Fun project here that could have a lot of uses – basically a TV remote to USB translator, so could think of a lot of ways to use something like this.  For me, I just wanted an easy way to channel surf using the same TV remote that came with the TV.  For this, I just read in the IR codes form the remote, then map them to key-strokes to do different things.  I could see the up/down left/right keys being used to drive the mouse around… lol, that might be my next project!

The bulk of the clip, however, is around a discussion on decoding IR signals and the programming involved (code available here), starting at about 6:00 in.