Infrared Emitters/LEDs and Receivers

[Samuel235]

I'm looking around at Infrared solutions for a smoke sensors, and I noticed that the receivers were stating a carrier frequency but yet the LEDs and the emitter wasn't. Back at the start of the development of my newest module I did some extensive research and end up going round in circles about this carrier frequency, and came to the conclusion that whatever carrier frequency the receiver wanted to hear is what i had to emulate with a LED. So because of this i went the route of a 555 timer and planned on pulsing the LED to match 38KHz. I'm now watching videos and reading and no one ever seems to mention this carrier frequency, would i be able to just provide the LED with the relevant power to light it up and that would be enough for my receiver to pick up the IR waves?

At a glance, I think this will work and therefor allow the receiver to detect the IR, but i'm not 100% sure and without the materials i can't test this just yet. What are your experiences with IR detection?

[hek]

I know @blacey did some research for the IR module... But he's out travelling at the moment so I'm not sure he follows the forum much.

[Samuel235]

@hek, thank you for that. I have had a quick look on his topics page and i will read through in more depth later on. I see he was the guy that created the IR Blaster than i was reading about a few months back. Looks a nice little module for universal controlling with IR. But again, by the looks of things i don't see any sort of PWM control going on with timers and what not. So unless this is handled through PWM pins (which i doubt because its all running through MOSFETS to power the IR LEDs equally) then it is just straight power to the LEDs when needed.

I'm pretty sure that as long as the wavelength matches we're good to go without pulsing.