IR Emitter

[opelnick]

Hello all. I have done a search of the forum and cant find too much info so ill start a new thread. Im expecting a USB-UIRT very soon and i am looking at controlling a STB in another room. I will most likely run an external IR emitter through the roof. What is the distance that the external IR emitter can run over? How do i make an IR emitter? Can you use Cat 5 to make it? Thanks

[KShots]

I'm a little confused by your question. Are you asking the maximum distance that USB will cover, or the maximum distance that an IR signal will cover?

As far as USB, you're going to cap out at about 6 ft. without special hardware. You can extend that via a USB hub for a short distance, or you can use USB extenders which run over CAT 5e cabling to up to 250 ft (I use this myself on my transceiver).

My setup is like so:

Computer in office
TV (with cable box) in living room
Distance: 185 ft.

Connections:

KVM extender runs RGB + keyboard + mouse over CAT-5 cabling through the roof for video and input (my TV has an RGB input of up to 1024x768 resolution (832x624 native))

Digital audio extender takes a dolby or dts signal over fiber or coax, converts it to CAT-5 (audio fiber is not real fiber, so its max distance is 20'), and also goes to the TV. This also required a sound card with on-board real-time dolby encoding. The HDA X-Mystique is capable of this (You won't find this in the sound blaster series), and the same company has a newer version of some sort out now.

Last, I picked up a USB extender as described above, and slapped a powered hub on the other end (I chose poorly, and the whole 185 ft. run was powered off of my USB bus on my computer - not the best of ideas. I also ended up with USB 1.1 (didn't read the fine print), but that's fine for an IR device).

So, yes, you can get around just about any cable limitation.