The second IR product I've been playing with is from IguanaWorks. It's a USB IR dongle with couple of different form factors. This is also the IR product listed in our original hardware reference implementation.

• I like the hardware much better than the Tira one, it's a USB dongle about the size of your USB memory stick with receiver and emitter leds embedded in it. So rather small, and nothing hanging out of your box at the end of a wire.

• However, the USB stick mounted on a box is much harder to place correctly so in practice the version with embedded transmitter leds is not the most convenient. The coneof the infrared light leaving the led is relatively narrow and will easily miss its target if for example the stick ends up in a wrong angle towards it.

• Luckily you can get the Iguana stick in different forms, with either 2 embedded leds and no extension jacks, one emitter led and one jack or two extender jacks. Recommend to get at least one extender jack minimum, probably with two.

• You can split the 2 stereo extender jacks into mono extenders giving you in theory an option of 4 separate extenders. Iguana supports 4 distinct channels for emitting IR.

• The infrared receiver cannot be moved out of the stick (no extenders)

• On the software side everything's open source with GPL license which I really like. Linux is the best supported platform although there are ports for Windows and Mac OS X. I didn't test the latter though.

• Iguana works with lirc (sort of, see later) for both receiving and transmitting (unlike Tira). However, the most common lirc packages for Ubuntu do not come compiled with Iguana as a driver option so you end up compiling lirc for Iguana by yourself. Not an insurmountable task since lirc treats Iguana as a user space driver so no great complications there. You can get lirc binaries with Iguana enabled from IguanaWorks website as well for some of the most common distros.

• Iguana comes with an ok set of tools and abstractions on top of the lower level driver interface (compared to Tira) which is nice and helps you get started with the product, even without lirc. Iguana comes with its own daemon and client programs that you can easily use to do some basic testing or recording of your remotes.

• Unfortunately, last but not least, I had some serious problems with the current version of iguana's daemon. This is partly my speculation as I haven't heard back from IguanaWorks yet to confirm the issues but it seems there's some concurrency problem with their daemon implementation (judging by the symptoms I was seeing and existing reports on their website). You can get Iguana up and running with lirc without too much trouble, and send some IR commands. However, eventually the transmitting will fail with a timeout from the iguana daemon, and subsequent transmits will keep failing until the daemon is restarted. Based on the other reports this could be a poor thread implementation in the linux libusb library that iguana daemon depends on. In practice this means you can't really trust Iguana for moderate to high level of transmits, some people have set up cron jobs and monitors to restart the daemon automatically when it fails. It is unfortunate and you won't notice this with a preliminary testing when just sending a few commands with Iguana.

Bottom line, I'd really like to like Iguana, I like a lot of what they do but can't really recommend it for anybody until the software issues above have been corrected.