Setting up the software

Now, it's time to set up the software to manage our infrared detector, and to do it, we're going to use the LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) subsystem, which is a special code that has been developed for this purpose.

Note

For further information on the LIRC subsystem, you can take a look at http://www.lirc.org/.

We'll need a kernel driver to convert the pulse generated by the infrared detector into well-defined messages, and then to send them, through a LIRC device, to the userspace programs. At userspace level, we're going to use a special tool from the LIRC project in order to convert the infrared messages into input events, that is, the messages that a normal keyboard sends to the kernel.

Note

For further information on the Linux input subsystem, you can take a look at https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/input/input.txt.

Setting up the kernel driver

To set up the kernel driver to manage our infrared receiver, we can use a procedure similar to the one used in...