Eloquent Universal Receiver For Your Home Entertainment Equipment

home-entertainment-universal-receiver

We’re really starting to enjoy the home entertainment control hacks which use a universal receiver to act on commands from any remote. This one is especially interesting as it uses a single remote to control the system but rolls in lots of extras.

Looking at the receiver itself the white plastic dome of the PIR sensor should raise an eyebrow. Since the cable box takes a while to turn on [Ivan] included the motion sensor to switch that component on when you walk into the room. This way it’ll be ready to go by the time you sit down. It does this by sending IR signals from the PIC32 dev board. Of course the board has its own receiver to listen for the remote control commands. The remote buttons have been mapped a bit differently than originally intended. You can see in the diagram above that the normal VCR/DVD/DVR buttons have been set to control the room’s LED strips. There’s even a power consumption monitor rolled into the project. All of these features are demonstrated in the clip after the break.

This is a nearly perfect base setup. But we’d love to see it with a web interface at some point in the future.

8 thoughts on “Eloquent Universal Receiver For Your Home Entertainment Equipment

  1. The major reason I made the device is because the STB has a ~7Wh power consumption in standby, that means each year that device consumes a staggering ~61kWh! I am not a big fan of wasting such amounts of energy but my TV provider did not cared much. So I had to do it myself – one of the things that were required to reduce the power consumption was IR control over the device. At the end once I have the setup in place I started using it (the IR control) for some other useful stuff.

  2. Girder and LIRC or winlirc. Done. Not trying to bash the use of that mess of a receiver, but dizzle, folks have figured this stuff out and made it easy for any of us years ago. Especially if it is connected to an HTPC that can decode on the fly. Nice project and good on the builder for getting things figured out again :)

    1. using a RasPi you dont even need an expensive IR receiver… Plus you can do more smart changes like a use timer to kill everything if you leave the room for 2 hours.

      1. wow fartface i wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt re: your constant trolling, bashing and misinformation, but really? expensive IR receiver? you do realize they are about 1/10th of the cost of the pi, and the software mentioned in the reply you commented under is free, right?

        1. Thanks notdave, you are correct that they are quite cheap. USB models from old htpcs show up quite regularly at the thrifts and a simple TRS minijack model is free from comcast (shudder) if you are a paying customer and complain about the remote reception although there are usually a couple in the box. Sorry about fartface I have his comments blocked out on my browser but you are correct in assuming he is a fat loser troll that was born 17 years ago when a pig got raped by his drunken father and shat a retarded tampon into the street.

          cheers :)

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