I have following goals for controlling my Infrared Controlled Appliances:
To achieve these goals, I have designed and tested initial version of my Centralized Home IR Appliances control system that can adapt and control different IR appliances at very cheap cost. The system has following features:
For implementing initial working prototype, I chose:
- Towards the goal of the controlling my TV, Set-Top-Boxes,AC,etc, at lower cost less than 5$ (or even go less in case one has more IR appliances or one has already a raspberry/chip in home for Home Automation/IoT works) per device. I am leaving the cost of central controller, whose cost would be around 9$.
- Design/Develop an Open Sourced system like LIRC project that controls the IR appliances using smartphone and WiFi(there by avoiding line of contact issues in IR based remote controls)
- Make any old TV(including CRT TV and LED TVs that are not smart TVs,etc) to be controlled from any smart phone
- Also ensure that smartphone SHOULD not require IR based emitter (as smartphones with IR transmitter are little costlier)
To achieve these goals, I have designed and tested initial version of my Centralized Home IR Appliances control system that can adapt and control different IR appliances at very cheap cost. The system has following features:
- It is cheap
- It Generic and one can add any number of IR devices
- All one has to for adding new IR appliance is to add the IR codes in form of property file
- Works with most of the smartphone (at present only android phones)
- Gives generic REST based interfaces to control these appliances (TODO)
- Gives generic RBAC control of these IR appliances (TODO)
For implementing initial working prototype, I chose:
- Common costs for all IR appliances in a Home
- 9$ Chip Computer as central control system where all Smart Phones sends commands . This device is common for all IR appliances in home (that are in same WiFi network). Though I have chose 9$ chip-computer, once can use Raspberry-PI or any computer that run python.
2A Power supply for each IR transmitter 2$ (approximate)
- Per IR appliance costs for IR Transmission
- For each IR appliance, I have put one ESP8266 device to send IR commands (which costed me 2.82$). For each IR appliance , we need to this board (in case if both appliances are not in same IR visibility)
- I bought one IR Transmitter for 1.1$ (approximate)
- Power supply for each IR transmitter 1.1$ (approximate)
At present the system control my TV and set-top-box. In future, I am going add more devices like my LG-Air-Conditioner
I have put code in 3 projects in Git-Hub:
I have put code in 3 projects in Git-Hub:
- Java based SW application named TVRemote ( Android Application that controls my TV and my set-top-box)
- C++ Based embedded Firmware Infrared-Command-Sender for sending IR based commands from ESP8266
- Python-Based Centralized Server for controlling all IR appliances running on 9$ Chip computer
