Uum ROb I think you are confused with something else. This is a serial infrared dongle which can be used to remote control a TV Card application. Not a encryption dongle companies use to protect their "intellectual property".

Jorg, thank you for your suggestion but I'm not intressted in IR standards, I just wanna know what signal comes out this device and howto process that signal.

Thw thing is made up of 2 parts.
1. IR controller
2. IR eye which connects to a RS232 port.

What I want todo is hook up the IR eye to my microcontroller.

Unfortunaly the whole thing is incased in plastic, so I can't open it up and have a look at it with out breaking the whole thing. I think there's some SMD curcuit in the plastic connector because it's noticably havier then other connectors.

What I have done is connect the IR eye to the serial port of my PC and instead of starting the re,ote control application I started a terminal program which listens to COM1. I strated puching buttons on the remote control but instead of getting allkinds of strange chars, I got a big black nothing, so I'm guessing there's some special way of controlling and reading the IR eye.

But how?!