After some searching, I ended up using a microcontroller and a piece of code borrowed from the web that I tweaked and adapted. The microcontroller-based concept was chosen because I wanted to scale ...

Due to the popularity of their first IR receiver post, the silver bullet IR receiver, [AnalysIR] decided to write a quick post about using IR on the Arduino.

Arduino Based Wireless Intrusion Detection Using IR Sensor and GSM Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) strive to catch computer system intrusion & utilize by any garnering and analyzing data.

You will not miss a single step if you follow his excellent videos below. Plus, here are some other ways and other tools for using an IR remote with your Arduino and cloning an infrared remote.