PART 4 - The soldering - DIY Infrared receiver for Pioneer Tapedecks

If you haven't read Part 3 - start here!

The soldering

As i showed in part 3 i found this old serial IR receiver, i believe i bought it in 1998 for my first DVD PC Player software.

Serial PC IR Receiver

I went to the electronic part store and bought a Stripboard, you can use them for prototyping or like me for small hacks.

Stripboard.

As you can clearly see, it is too large to fit in to the small remote box. So i used the original board as a template.

Find a spot where it fits.

Here you can see the outline of the original board.

Get you saw and cut it along the outline to create you own board from the Stripboard.

The cut-out in the box - fits!

It is not a "perfect" fit, but it will do. Next, solder all the components to the mini Stripboard. For that i need some wires.

1. The Mono Trigger cable. 
2. The Ground cable to provide a common ground between the Remote receiver and the tapedeck.
3. And a suitable USB 2.0 or 1.0 cable to provide the Power +5V for the Remote receiver.

Mono Trigger cable and below the Ground cable.

To get the idea, here how this will be connected when its done. 

Cut all 3 cables to the same length, make the ground cable a bit longer so that you have some slack, when screwing it to the tapedeck later.

I'll jump right to the finished part. Oh, my god, i soldered the components on the wrong side! 😱

Up in the left corner the Red and Black wires from the USB cable provides +5 Volt and Ground. The trigger cable is connected directly to the Out of the IR Receiver. And behind going off to the left is the much thinner ground cable.

Alternatively you could use a minijack Stereo cable instead, this way you would only have two cables out of the Receiver box. The Trigger signal must go the the Left channel (white wire) and the Right channel (red wire) goes to ground. On the receiving end you must then breakout the red wire and connect to the chassis of the tapedeck, because the Control IN connector doesn't provide Ground, as discussed in Part 1 of this Blog.

As you might see i have bend the pins of the IR Receiver in a S-Form because it is a relative big component. If i soldered it directly on the board it wouldn't have fit inside the box.

All soldered.

The other components were soldered on to the board just like on the breadboard. You can see that i mounted the both capacitors horizontally, so that they fit well inside the box.

This all depends on your box size.

Me trying to fit the 3 cables in a way that all gets out of the same hole!

I snapped the lid on and connected it the the Pioneer tapedeck.

Trigger cable goes to Control IN and the ground wire is screwed onto one of the screws on the backside.

So everything is hooked up - all i have to do now is to test the end result.

Roll video:

That's it! I am so happy with this solution.

The good thing about this hack is, you can use it with any of the Pioneer CT-S models that have a Control IN Port on the backside.

Here is small list:

CT-95, CT-43, CT-S900S, CT-S910S, CT-S920S, CT-S810, CT-S820S (obviously), CT-S830S, CT-S710, CT-S720, CT-S730S and on and on the list goes.

Hope you liked this DIY blog. Please write a comment if you did!

Cheers 🍺

Per

Go to Part 5