Hello all,

I have been trying to teach myself about microcontrollers and the like. I am at a bit of a loss though. Your help would be great.


I have a project where i would like to use IR to turn on/off a 3 watt LED.
The remote would need to be small (like the size of a watch) and the reciever would need to fit in an aluminum tube that is a 1 1/4 diameter. There will be a hole in the tube for proper LOS of the IR. These all will need to be power with batteries. The IR receiver will be activating a relay switch because the 3 watt will draw more power than the reciever set up (i would imagine)

I was at first looking at basic microcontrollers suchs as Motorola/freescale, AVR, and PIC. Then I stumbled upon the motorola encoders/decoders.

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MC145026P Encoder Motorola | Jameco Electronics


So my question is should I go with microcontrollers or the encoder/decoders. I would think the encoder/decoders but would i still need to do some programming or are they precoded to work with one another? or is there a better way to do it?

Thank you all very much in advance.