Clearly the folks behind the Flirc project are into helping build a high quality media center experience all around. You can link literally any IR-based remote to any media center system that has a USB port that will accept a keyboard input.Īs an aside before we continue on with the tutorial, FLIRC also makes a really awesome Raspberry Pi 2 / B+ case (~$16) that features an integrated aluminum-body heat sink if you’re looking for a good media center case for your Pi it’s not just good looking it’s also quite efficient at keeping your board cool. You don’t need special drivers, you don’t need to edit the keymaps of your device (if you’re even able to), and you don’t need a special remote.

The cleverness of this solution lies in the fact that it’s universal.

Then when you have the FLIRC dongle plugged into your media center and you press the remote button the media center is tricked into thinking the FLIRC USB dongle is actually a keyboard and that you’ve just pressed the “Home” key. You can take a button on your media center remote and map it, via the FLIRC system, to represent the “Home” key on a traditional keyboard. So let’s say the media center software you’re using is keymapped for the “Home” key on the keyboard to return you to the home screen of the media center software. Rather than acting as a “dumb” IR-to-USB bridge that simply passes the IR commands along to the host operating system the FLIRC unit is actually a programmable device that uses USB HID (Human Interface Device) standards to emulate a keyboard. Further, it requires you’ve already purchased an IR dongle of some sort (which can run you anywhere from $10-20).įLIRC, on the other hand, circumvents the entire problem in a rather novel way. It’s not a light task, however, and certainly not a task for beginners. You see there is a fundamental problem when it comes to linking your typical universal or TV remote to a media center system like a Raspberry Pi running Kodi/XBMC, an Amazon Fire TV, a computer running Plex or Windows Media Center, or the like: these devices are either optimized for their own special remote (such as the bluetooth remote that comes with the Amazon Fire TV) or they are optimized for keymaps that map onto a keyboard (like Kodi/XBMC and Windows Media Center).ĭon’t get us wrong, it’s more than possible to dig into the guts of many media center software packages (like Kodi/XBMC) and remap the keys. The Flirc unit is far more clever than a simple storage unit though and works as an absolutely ingenious solution to the problem of linking IR-based remotes to media center software. At first glance it would be remarkably easy to confuse the Flirc unit with an actual thumb drive as the clear case, visible circuit board, and the IR receiver points (that look much like LED indicator lights) all strongly echo the design of thumb drive storage.

Flirc ($20) is a tiny USB dongle about half the size of a traditional thumb drive.

Flirc android