Recently, someone on the Lirc mailing list asked for help with a piece of hardware called IrDroid. I got interested in finding out what it was all about. So I ordered one such. To cut a long story short, it turned out that it is nothing but a stripped-down (bootloader. IR Detector, accessible GPIO pins missing), and old firmware (2.0)! After soldering in the ICSP header, I could succefully flash the 2.2 firmware (AND bootloader!), and Lirc was happy.
So, simply put, IrDroid is half of an IrToy to twice the price. Well.... Congrats to Dangerous Prototypes!
The IrToy contains a few GPIO, which are normally unused. It is easy to solder some LEDs to these, to get an idea of what the thing is trying to do, and to help with debugging. Actually, I implemented this in IrScrutinizer already in version 1.1.2, the current version, but never told anyone about it :-). It works like this: Whenever the device is opened, one LED (RA5) is on. When the device is waiting for IR signals, another (RA3) is on. Finally, RA4 is lit whenever IR transmission takes place.
I just implemented this in the Lirc driver by Peter Kooiman, irtoy.c. The first three LEDs work in a similar fashion, there is also a fourth one, RA2, which is on during actual reception of IR. It is submitted as merge request to Lirc, https://sourceforge.net/p/lirc/git/merge-requests/15/ where it can be downloaded for those who do not want to wait.
Written in Java (with the exception of two native libraries), most of the functionality of the program is available on every Java platform. The native libraries (DecodeIR and RXTX) are presently available for 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux (x86 and amd-64), and MacOsX, and can with moderate effort be compiled for other platforms.
The program is free software licensed under the GPL3 license.
The present version is called 1.1.0, and can be downloaded from my website. I just fixed a number of IrToy related issues; a patch kit containing these fixes is found as IrScrutinizer-1.1.0-1.1.0a.zip
Only Version 2.2 of the IrToy firmware seems to work well with IrScrutinizer.
Bug reports, suggestions for improvements etc, are kindly solicited.
(Sorry I am not allowed to post URLs, Google for "IrScrutinizer" for an URL.)