Get binary data from audio impulses

Question

I have IR sensor which have TRS connector and I can record my remotes signals into audio. Now I want to control my computer with TV remote, but I don't have any clue how to compare audio input with pre-recorded audio. But after I realized that these audio waves contains only some kind data (binary) I can turn these into binary or hex, so it is much easier to compare.

Waves look just like this:

And this:

These are records of "OK" button, sometimes there are some impulses on right channel too and I don't know why, it seems like connections in sensor are damaged maybe. Ok thats not matter, anyway

I need help with python program which read these impulses and turn these into binary, in realtime from audio input(mic). I know it's sounds like "Do it for me, while I enjoy my life", but I don't have experiences with sound transforming/reading... I've looking for python examples for recording and reading audio, but unsuccessfully.

Answer 1

The this is quite easy if you can forgo the real time requirement: just save the data as a .wav file, and then read it in using Python's wave module.

Here's an example of how to read a wav file in Python,

import wave

w = wave.open("myfile.wav", "rb")
binary_data = w.readframes(w.getnframes())
w.close()

It's possible to do this in real time, but it's harder, though still not super difficult. For real time, I use PyAudio, and a good start would be to follow the examples in the demos. In these you basically open a stream and read small chunks at a time, and if you want any interactivity, you need to do this in a thread.

(Also, note, that the sound card will filter your audio inputs, so what you see isn't going to be the true input signal. In particular, I think remote controls often have a carrier frequency around 40KHz, which is higher than human hearing, so I doubt that sound cards work well in this range, though they may be sufficient depending on what you want to do.)