I wasn't expecting to get much done on Elmo over the Christmas period because we had family visiting. Having mentioned my IR transmitter problems to Dad, an ex-BBC electronic engineer, he came up with a lot of good advice and we spent a happy morning fiddling with the Elmo breadboard and troubleshooting his ideas for a signal amplifier.
During the process, I discovered that, unlike most mobile phone cameras, my iPhone 5 doesn't pick up IR very well. We were using the camera to see when the IR transmitter was working and were getting rather baffled as to why nothing seemed to be coming out of the transmitter. Switching to Mum's old Nokia phone and the IR transmitter lit up like a Christmas tree and we knew we had the right approach.
Some more fiddling and highly technical walking backwards and forwards holding a Sky box to test the range and we'd fine tuned the components to give a good range of IR transmission - certainly plenty for now. What a great result.
There is a Mark 2 circuit to come, but for now, here's the schematic we've ended up with:
All credit goes to Dad for the IR transmitter. Now I'm set to continue development.
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