IR TV Remote

A web-based TV remote control served from a Raspberry Pi. An SVG remote is displayed in the browser — clicking a button sends a POST request to the Express server, which triggers the IR LED via IR-Slinger and libpigpio.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi with an IR LED wired up (see Hardware setup)
• Node.js 24+
• GCC + libpigpio (for compiling the IR transmitter)

Setup

1. Install libpigpio

git clone https://github.com/joan2937/pigpio.git
cd pigpio
make
sudo make install

2. Compile the IR transmitter

cd src/ir-slinger
gcc -o tvRemote tvRemote.c -lm -lpigpio -pthread -lrt

3. Configure

Edit config.json and set the path to the compiled executable:

{
    "pathToExecutable": "/path/to/tvRemote"
}

4. Add your IR codes

Edit src/data/RemoteKeysBinaryMapping.json to map button IDs to the binary IR codes for your specific TV (Check tutorial under src/ir-slinger/bschwind-tutorial.png for how to capture).

5. Install dependencies and build

npm install
npm run build

6. Start the server

npm start

The remote is then available at http://<raspberry-pi-ip>:3000.

Docker

docker compose up --build

This builds the frontend and starts the server in one step. Mount config.json as a volume to change settings without rebuilding the image.

Development

npm run dev   # Vite dev server on :5173, proxies /api to Express on :3000
npm start     # Express server on :3000 (in a separate terminal)

Hardware setup

See this blog post by Brian Schwind for a full walkthrough of the hardware setup and IR protocol.

Credits & Licenses

• libpigpio — GPIO library for the Raspberry Pi
• IR-Slinger — IR signal library by Brian Schwind
• remote.svg — public domain SVG by AshKyd