Hacker News

Home Assistant* introduced support for infrared a few days ago. Not sure if it would be a good idea to stay in business for a bit longer and see if the Home Assistant community boost the sales.

I am personally interested in an IR Sender to make my old Hifi Setup smarter.

* https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2026/04/01/release-20264/

Well damn, I didn't know about this until now, and I could actually use one.

Is there any alternative?

Sad to see someone’s small business close, but these products are in a difficult position of being both extremely niche and very simple. Someone went to some effort to source a nice dongle enclosure and do some printing on it, but beyond that the hardware is something that anyone with a little PCB experience could replicate it in a day. I wouldn’t be surprised if these were just sourced from a generic manufacturer in China and they asked for custom printing.

If there’s demand this would be a good project for someone to make and have ready to build PCBs you could order from OSH Park or even a fully project that you could have JLC build and populate.

I’m guessing that modern hardware are all controlled by privacy-invading apps, communicating via the company’s servers.

Presumably there just isn't that much use for that anymore.

Most remotes seem to be RF not ir these days.