See, I told you I wasn't a hardware guy.

Thank you so much for your suggestions. I'm going to give both the software (piscope) and the hardware (an oscilloscope) a shot.

Ah ha... I bet you are talking about piscope. This looks promising, thanks!

Thanks for the reply! I'll definitely try your suggestion. Being a software guy, we're already outside the realm of my knowledge, so I'll need to do some research to figure out how to "scope" the units. If you have any tips to save me time, I'll gladly accept them! As a conceptual question to any ha...

tl;dr - Can the Pi board itself interfere with IR signals, but only temporarily? I'm having a vexing issue with my Pi 2. I have an IR sensor wired up to the GPIO pins (3.3V, GND, and #18). I'm running Arch and using lircd to interpret the IR signal. 95% of the time, everything works great! But the o...