LIRC won't setup the device

Question

Very new to this low-level driver stuff, so many places to make mistakes. Basically I'm trying to get an IR transmitter with lirc. I have a IR led to pin 23 with a transistor, however there's nothing in /dev/lirc or /dev/lirc0

I installed lirc with apt-get install lirc,

then added dtoverlay=lirc-rpi,gpio_out_pin=23,gpio_in_pin=22 to config.txt and changed lirc_options.conf to

driver          = default
device          = /dev/lirc0

However, there's nothing in /dev, and if I try to send with irsend I get hardware does not support sending. The system status for lircd shows this error:

Error: could not get file information for /dev/lirc0

I'm using a RPi 3B running Raspbian Stretch with Linux raspberrypi 4.19.42-v7+ #1219 firmware.

I don't know what other command dump you might need so just comment and I'll add to the question

NOTE: I was reading about gpio-ir however that seems to be receiver only. Any link to any library with IR transmission would be appreciated too.

Answer 1

So apparently the only problem is that the lirc drivers are outdated and not present in newer versions of raspbian. Just change that to the new gpio-ir-tx driver and all will work fine. Also note the syntax for the pins changed slightly. I.e, this is what you need in your /boot/config.txt

dtoverlay=gpio-ir-tx,gpio_pin=23