IR Air Conditioner Timer

installed (Custom)

[Tom] has an office job in China. His office is cooled by a small single room air conditioner. In an effort to make his office a little more comfortable, he built this IR timer unit. It cools his office down before he gets there so he doesn’t have to wait for it in the morning. He started by decoding the IR signal from the remote for the unit. He then built this ATiny13 based remote. He notes that the internal clock of this thing isn’t that accurate. power cycling it every day seems to help. It is also pretty cool that he built the unit to not only send the cooling code, but he can switch it to the heating code for the winter.

[thanks Mario]

20 thoughts on “IR Air Conditioner Timer

  1. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just hack the AC unit controller or just wire in a simple timer? Interesting approach but could be accomplished much easier IMHO.
    I can see many applications that could benefit from Tom’s work on this hack. Very in-depth, nice work!

  2. @gomer pyle,

    I very much doubt his workplace would allow him to dismantle his AC because he couldn’t wait the 5 minutes for his room to cool down (no disrespect, this is an awesome hack)

  3. The attiny MCUs I’ve used can use an external crystal for higher precision timing. I seem to remember them being orders of magnitude more accurate than the internal timer. The extra components could probably be rigged to fit on the existing board too (just a crystal and two 7-12 pF loading capacitors).

    Alternatively, there is usually an option in AVR Studio to calibrate the internal timer of the MCU to improve accuracy somewhat. I’ve never used it though.

  4. @Sean:

    Unfortunately, the ATtiny13 does not support using an external crystal. An externally generated clock source is supported, but this would require more than just an external crystal. I suppose using a cheap RTC might be the easiest way to get an accurate time source.

  5. dealextreme sells “universal” AC remotes for ~$7 which include a clock/timer feature. Still a good project though.

    @vonskippy: even if he had access to the AC power plug of the air conditioner, that may not work. Some units are remote control only, they don’t have front dials and knobs.

  6. Hi guys

    i want to teach a device the on off code for my air con, so i can mount a light switch sized box on the wall near the air con unit, press on and then an hour later the unit sends the off message, to save electricity when i rent my house out.

    also i do not want to leave the original remote in the house for kids and such to mess with/ break/ or lose.

    any ideas please

    kev

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