Patrick:

I had not read the entire thread and may have thrown my 2cents into something beyond my knowledge of IR Remote Controls.

However, just to clarify, I use an IR Remote Control and IR Receiver from Celadon - nothing else (no Spitfire IR control or the likes). If I plug the IR Receiver to an eletrical outlet and press any of the IR Remote Control buttons, the LED light on the IR Receiver blinks. If I then connect the IR Receiver to COM1 I can, through HyperTerminal or my VFP program usng MSCOMM32.OCX, directly capture the ASCII code send by the IR Remote Contols. For me, it was that simple. Actually there was a lot more work involved but the end relation between the IR Remote Control, IR ReceIver, COM Port, MSCOMM32.OCX, and VFP was smooth and easy - my one IR Remote Control can control both my computer and an amplifier.

Perhaps Celadon understood what I needed and made it easy for me.

Mal

>Nuno -
>
>consumer electronic remote controls do NOT control a TV or VCR by
>emitting ASCII characters. the IR signals they transmit are
>proprietary pulse trains that do not represent ASCII characters.
>the wavelength of the infrared used is not even the same as that
>used with IrDA.
>
>i assume what you are doing is sending ASCII characters from your
>COM1 port to your PCTV remote control. in a similar setup, i am
>using a Spitfire IR control (made be Innotech Systems) to do the
>same. the Spitfire has an LED that blinks when it receives
>ASCII characters from the COM port. does yours ?
>
>if you don't know for sure that your ASCII characters are being
>delivered to the COM port (and thus to the remote control), i would
>repeat my earlier suggestion, that you get either a breakout box
>or an ASCII terminal to monitor what characters are being sent.
>
>the the documentation for your remote control. on some of them,
>you have to send a certain character sequence to "wake it up"
>so that it will respond to subsequent characters. for what it's
>worth ... when i was using an ALL-IN-ONE universal remote control
>to do this, it also required a certain timing between the "wake-up"
>character sequence. check with your manufacturer about those 2
>issues.