Sometimes it takes far too much time to do what you thought would be something quick. I wanted to connect a IR receiver to an Arduino to read out the code when I press POWER on the Surround Sound Home Theater AV Receiver. I need that to be able to automate it.

6 hours later I'm finally able to. It took several hours and 4 different USB2Serial adapters to finally understand that I need to reboot my Linux machine after I upgraded the kernel probably several weeks ago. Then the Arduino IDE which Arch ships has a bug which crashes it on upload to the ESP8266 to which I switched because I thought the Arduino was broken. Compiling the newest IDE version from code helped.

I actually wanted to fiddle with sending the signal instead of receiving it today, but it's 10:45pm already so my home automation will switch everything off in 15 minutes automatically and I'll go to bed.