While tidying up I've found a few Irman infrared to serial dongles https://web.archive.org/web/20060314052558/http://www.evation.com/irman/index.html
they connect via a 9 pin serial plug and then convert any consumer remote IR signals they receive into serial. No additional power required, good wide angle reception, open source driver still available https://sourceforge.net/projects/libirman/ Could make an interesting project for anyone who wants to control their VAX / S-100 / homebrew retro board with a serial port via a remote :) The company making them went away about a decade ago, so I'm counting that as in retro territory. I have four for the price of shipping if anyone is interested, based in London/UK. (Around 2000 we had an office music system based around a DNARD/Shark running mserv & irman where everyone had a random remote at their desk and could use it to rate/skip/queue something they liked, and the system generally trid to pick from music which most of the people currently connected liked... ahh, fun days :) David
