Receiver hardware for IR beam (red eye)?

[Martin Hepperle]

There are plenty of IrDA Transceiver modules should probably work for this purpose.
One of these modules is what you find inside the HP C4103.

At the time, I simply used the C4190 because it came with a nice small case with HP logo and it was not necessary to design a PCB or any other interface circuitry, and no need to look for a decent case.

If you want to design a completely new device, I would study the datasheets of these IrDA transceivers. For a selection see e.g. Digikey.

Like in the HP part, these are bi-directional, and have two separate lenses, so one could also use them for a combined printer receiver/sender module.

Martin