Building a IR Blaster

Bill Giannikos (bill2 at giannikos.com.au)

This guide is to help you build a IR blaster which connects to the serial port of your computer and will be used to control your STU (for Foxtel, Austar etc.). There are plenty of guides on how to build the IR blaster on the net already so I wont cover it again here (links to these guides are below). What I will cover here is where to obtain the parts needed and how to connect it up to the foxtel STU.

All the parts for the blaster are available from Jaycar and maybe Dick Smiths as well. Here is what you need (with a link to jaycar):

• D9 Female Connector - Solder - link
• D9 Backshell - link
• Cable (pretty much anything will do, two wires needed which are long enough to run from the MythTV computer to your STU)
• 1N4148 Diode - link
• 1K Resistor - link
• Infrared LED - link

Total cost only about $5.

You can follow this guide to build the IR blaster, follow the simple transmitter guide. The instructions warn that it may do harm to your serial port, but I've been using this setup for years on several different systems without issue. The building of this device is very simple if you have done soldering before, otherwise it's best to get someone who knows how to do it, or buy a pre-built blaster from the internet.

Here are some pictures of my effort. It should provide you a good guide for building it yourself.

Here is the end result.

Here is a picture of the components inside the casing. If you look closely you can see the resistor and the diode.

Here is the infrared LED attached to the foxtel STU. It should be positioned directly over the receiver of your STU.

Finally here is the same as above except with some black tape. The black tape is used to block out other IR singles from other IR blasters. This is useful when you have two or more foxtel STUs in the area.