Im at the stage as you.
Connected the device, it flashes.
this command >dmesg | grep -i usb
confirms the usb-uirt is detected on ttyUSB0
[ 6.903758] usb 1-1.3: Detected FT232BM
[ 6.918645] usb 1-1.3: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0
in the pi configuration menu I disabled IR GPIO which I believe removes the two GPIO pin 17,18 from /boot/config.txt (this hasn’t made any difference to ttyUSB0 status)
from command I should be able to run
irw
then press any keys which are configured in the remote /etc/lirc/lirc.conf
and then should respond with remote code here. I dont know why it doesn’t work.
I got this information from:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=48443