I had the same errors where connection to usb device fails after number of sent IR signals. I use IrDroid USB stick which is based on irtoy. Nothing worked for me in Raspberry Pi 3. But I finally fixed it, the solution is not trivial and was found here: https://gist.github.com/bullshit/918d74 ... nt-1815751
Basically I took the lircd sources 0.9.4d and updated manually plugins/irtoy.c file, the deal was to increase timeouts: