LIRC on a Raspberry Pi for a silver Apple TV remote

The idea here is to control a full-screen chromium webpage via a simple remote control (I'm using it for full-screen TV-like prototypes). It's very straightforward really, but

I couldn't find the right kind of summary of LIRC, the linux infrared remote tool
It look me a while to realise that the receiver end of IR was so easy if you have a GPIO (as on a Raspberry Pi) rather than using USB
Chromium 51 is now the default on Raspberry Pi's Jessie, making it easy to do quite sophisticated web interfaces on the Pi3

The key part is the mapping between what LIRC (or its daemon version) does when it hears a keypress and what you want it to do. Basically there's

an lircd.conf file that maps the IR data to the names of keys on the remote
an .lircrc file that maps the key press on the remote it receives to a command (e.g. a bash script like this one)
I've used xdotool to send keyboard commands to the web page I'm interested in
I've provided some examples of using keyboard keycodes in the webpage

It's all a bit confusing as we're using remote key presses mapped to the nearest keyboard commands in HTML in Javascript. But it works perfectly.

I've provided an example lircd.conf for silver Apple TV remotes, but you can generate your own for any IR remote easily enough.

The way I've used xdotool assumes there's a single webpage open in chromium with a specific title - "lirc-example".

Full instructions are in github.

ir_pi3

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