Some you may have heard about the Neutrino, a scaled down compatible version of the Arduino Zero.
A desirable characteristic is that it has low power features, and its high speed makes it viable for infrared remote control use, either via USB (even On-The-Go, especially if made more compact for a dongle), or an audio interface with commands to set carrier frequency, sleep, wake up etc.
I believe that handling of infrared carrier frequencies up to 455kHz (either transmission or learning) is possible with the Arduino Zero or compatible, whereas a number of low-cost infrared dongles only support 38kHz carrier transmission - Sony (40kHz) or Philips (36kHz) devices typically have degraded reception performance when used with a 38kHz carrier.
Neutrino infrared dongle viability
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Neutrino infrared dongle viability
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Nice to hear from you again! 
There are several 32 bit stamp size boards around, even Arduino compatible. In my shelf I have one Teensy 3.1 that has not seen power yet...
It strikes me that the GPIO pins are limited to 7mA (just as with the Zero), which (probably) prohibits connecting a sender IR Led directly without a driver transistor. For a dongle-type design, this is definitely a drawback. (E.g. the Nano supplies 40mA.) Also, the in this forum popular sensor QSE15* does not accept to be feed with 3.3 V (according to specs). But that is probably not an issue, since (e.g.) TSMP58000 is probably a better solution, which is 3.3V compatible.
BTW, please check out my Arduino-IR work on Github.
There are several 32 bit stamp size boards around, even Arduino compatible. In my shelf I have one Teensy 3.1 that has not seen power yet...
It strikes me that the GPIO pins are limited to 7mA (just as with the Zero), which (probably) prohibits connecting a sender IR Led directly without a driver transistor. For a dongle-type design, this is definitely a drawback. (E.g. the Nano supplies 40mA.) Also, the in this forum popular sensor QSE15* does not accept to be feed with 3.3 V (according to specs). But that is probably not an issue, since (e.g.) TSMP58000 is probably a better solution, which is 3.3V compatible.
BTW, please check out my Arduino-IR work on Github.