[Fall Deaf] built an Arduino based universal remote control system. It uses a shield which has both an IR receiver and transmitter. This gives it the tools to learn codes from your existing remotes and play them back in order to control the devices. This functionality is really nothing new, but we think the user interface he developed for the system is absolutely fantastic!

Software is web-based. You can simply point a remote at the Arduino and push a button. The receiver will store the code which can later be assigned to a virtual button. The image above shows the channel-up option being created; it will be added to the list once confirmed. From there any web enabled device – smart phone, tablet, netbook, etc – can be used as the remote for the system. The only feature we think is missing is the ability to alter the layout of the buttons, with larger areas for the most frequently used commands.

After the break you can see a demonstration of this system, as well as the one extra feature we haven’t touched on yet. [Fall Deaf] included a Piezo element in the hardware design which lets him knock on his coffee table to use the remote if a smart-device isn’t close at hand.

The Syma S107 IR is a popular little remote controlled helicopter. When a friend of [Michael]‘s started flying one around the office he decided to try and jam the signal, creating a no fly zone. Luckily some people on the internet have already decoded the IR signals used by the flying menace. From there, a quick browsing of Mouser to source some LEDs, and to whip up some code for a TI MSP430 was all that was left.

The software on the micro controller is set to broadcast a “thrust off” signal, but [Michael] admits he is not 100% sure if the helicopter is actually receiving that, or if the signal from the no fly zone is mixing with the remote’s signal, causing garbage to be received. Either way when the helicopter gets in range of the no fly zone pad it drops from the air.

Things didn’t go perfectly though, overestimating the current capabilities of the MSP was causing the micro controller to reset and crash the debugger. But a simple rearrangement of how the signals are sent quickly solved this problem.

Join us after the break for a quick video.

There are many microcontrollers available to make robots with, but few that are built with the exact features that you would need to construct one. Meet the [EMGRobotics  MSP430G2553] robot controller board.

At $15 without the CPU or $17 with a [MSP430G2553] already plugged into the socket, this control board may make some Arduino enthusiasts take note for their next project.  Besides a very attractive price (you’ll have to go to the home page to make a purchase), this board ships with a built in IR range sensor and accommodations to drive up to four hobby servo motors. If this isn’t enough for you, two 3 volt DC motors can be soldered directly to connections on the board and controlled independently and in either direction. In other words you don’t have to muck about with trying to build your own H-bridge circuit, it’s all taken care of for you!

The article shows it controlling a Hexbug spider. [EMGRobotics] has actually done something similar (and well-documented) before with this platform, so be sure to check out the post about hacking the Hexbug iteslf!

[Nirav] painted this masterpiece by hand… with a little help from a computer. He calls it the semi-automatic paintbrush because you do need to move it over the canvas by hand, but a computer decides when to dispense the ink.

He’s using a piece of hardware we looked at back in September called the InkShield that got a boost from Kickstarter. It’s an Arduino shield that drives an inkjet printer cartridge. The trick is how to know when the cartridge is in position for printing.

The system uses visual processing for that. [Nirav] added an IR led to the cartridge, and uses a camera to extrapolate its position. He actually reused a Python homography module which he had written for use with a projector. That setup was developed as a digital white board, but works just as well for this purpose.

He mentions that results like this won’t be featured in an art museum. But the look is unique, and we’d love to make a set of geeky thank-you notes using the technique.

14 year-old [Connor Smith] has been busy this holiday season, thinking up ways to improve the lighting situation at home.

A few weeks ago he put together this 3-channel light controller to toggle his parents’ external lights, incorporating an Arduino for control. The Arduino was used to switch the channels on and off at specified intervals in order to create a simple light show on the house’s exterior. Not satisfied with just a few strings of blinky lights, he took his controller back inside for some additional modifications.

He had grown tired of crawling behind the Christmas tree to plug and unplug it every day, and decided to make things easier on himself. He stripped the IR receiver out of an old VCR and interfaced it with the Arduino in his light controller using the IRremote library. After taking a bit of time to decode the values for two infrequently used buttons on his TV remote, he had himself a Christmas tree light switch that he could activate from across the room.

Check out the short video below to see his remote switch in action.

[Owen] has a fairly big project in the works, where he’ll need to use infrared light to send data wirelessly between two nodes. The only problem with his grand plan is that he has never built anything of the sort. As a learning exercise, he decided to try his hand at building a wireless control interface for his laptop, which he uses to play music while doing homework.

His laptop usually sits across the room from [Owen], where it is connected to a speaker and amplifier. He hates getting up repeatedly to change songs, so he figured he might as well build an IR receiver to control Winamp that responds to commands from his TV’s remote control. Using his Open Bench logic sniffer and an IR receiver from an old VCR, he deciphered his remote’s encoding system. He then programmed an ATtiny13 to decode messages received by the IR sensor, sending them to his laptop via USB.

He packaged things inside a tiny mint tin, which he hangs from a desk lamp while in use. Now he can easily perform just about any action in Winamp with a few button presses on his remote. [Owen] says that he’s incredibly happy with the results, and now that he has a firm grasp of IR signaling concepts, we can’t wait to see what he builds next.

[Dmitry Grinberg] has to walk all the way across his bedroom to switch the lamp on and off. The drudgery of this finally became too much, so he built a remote control and added dimming for good measure. Above you can see the circuitry for the remote and the receiver, as well as the finished remote housed in what he calls a ‘Chinese Altoids tin’.

After the break you’ll find [Dmitry's] demo video. The remote control is quite responsive, and the dimming has great resolution. That’s thanks to a power N-channel MOSFET which switches the AC with the help of a full wave rectifier. The PIC 12F617 that controls the MOSFET is powered separately, and [Dmitry] mentions that you must use a transformer and not a switch-mode power supply to avoid a fire. We’d like to know more about this, so leave a comment if you are able to explain further.

The remote and receiver communicate via Infrared. The protocol is operating with 38 kHz signals using an easily sourced receiver tuned to that frequency. [Dmitry] shares all the details about the encoding scheme that he uses. Recreating this communications pairing is a great way to test your understanding of this technique. But if you need a refresher, here’s a tutorial to push you in the right direction.

[Gary] had an RF triggered light switch kicking around, and wanted to find a way to control his lights using a home theater remote. The switch, which he bought from RadioShack years ago, came with a simple remote that uses two buttons to toggle the lights on and off. While you might think that switching from RF to IR control would be a step backwards, [Gary] really just wanted to consolidate remotes more than anything else.

He designed a circuit board specifically for interacting with the remote half of his RF controller. It sports a PIC16F628A micro controller, which is tasked with processing IR commands from his home theater remote and triggering the lights when requested.

The code he developed for the project is relatively simple, but very useful all the same. When his board is powered on, it stores the first IR code it receives, then retains it as long as it stays powered on. This lets [Gary] use any button on his remote to turn the lights on and off, without any IR codes permanently defined in software.

As you can see in the video below, the modified switch works just as intended, saving [Gary] from having to walk all the way to the light switch when it’s time to fire up a movie.

Hackaday reader [Kieran] volunteers at an outdoor haunted house attraction called the “Disenchanted Forest”. Attendees are lead through the haunted forest by a volunteer, who helps keep everyone on the predetermined trail. The trail is usually lit by small LED fixtures that the group constructed, but the organizers wanted to make the lights more interactive this time around.

A fellow organizer gave [Kieran] a [Harry Potter] Magic Candle, which allows him to light the toy with the wave of his IR-enabled wand. He was told to “make it do something cool”, so he took a closer look at it to determine how everything worked.

Using an Arduino clone and some borrowed IR code he was able to get the wand to work with the forest’s trail lighting, but there was a lot of lag between waving the wand and triggering the light. Taking a second stab at it, [Kieran] was able to replicate the IR protocol used by the toy, speeding things up and increasing the wand’s range considerably. Now, the tour guides can light and extinguish the trail lighting with a simple flick of the wrist.

Take a look at the video below to see how things worked out for [Kieran], and be sure to swing by his site for more details if you have the urge to modify your Magic Candle.

Here are the guts of [Lukasz's] infrared camera remote control. He based it off of an existing design, but looked for places where improvements could be made. He felt the ATtiny2313 was a bit wasteful in this case. But further investigation led him to see why it was chosen. If you were to drop down to an ATtiny13 the ability to connect a crystal oscillator is lost (that chip only offers a 1-pin clock signal input) and the internal RC oscillator isn’t quite up to his standards for reliable IR communications.

Instead of driving the IR LED directly from an AVR pin he used a transistor in hopes that it will allow the maximum current to flow through the diode when in use. We’re not sure if it’s necessary, but we can see how it makes sense. Power is received from an unregulated 3 volt coin cell, so maybe as that voltage drops over time this will come into play.

Speaking of that coin cell, battery life is a concern here. [Lukasz] is using the sleep functions of the AVR after three seconds of use. This should keep the cell alive for quite a long time. But his 0 volt measurement is an anomaly with the multimeter he’s using. To get a precise measurement for tiny current flow you need extra equipment, like [Dave Jones'] uCurrent adapter.

The schematic for this Canon camera compatible project is only provided in Eagle format so we’ve embedded an image of it after the break for your convenience. You should have no problem making this work with a Nikon if you swap out some of the code from the TV-B-Gone shutter release we saw on Thursday.

After seeing a writeup online that demonstrated how to build an “Emergency Party Button”, [spikec] knew that he had to have one of his own. He happened to have a USAF B-8 stick grip from an A-10A aircraft laying around, and figured it would be perfect for controlling the A/V system in his basement.

The control stick was mounted to the top of a cheap cigar humidor, and crammed full of any electronic component he could get his hands on. It contains not one, but two Arduinos. The first is tasked with reading the flight stick’s inputs and the IR control of his various appliances, while another triggers the overhead lighting in his bar along with the X10 controlled Emergency Party System. He contemplated combining all of the functionality into one device, but splitting the tasks in two was easier for this self-declared electronics novice.

The various buttons on the control stick can be used to power all of his A/V appliances on and off, control volume levels, and select which songs stream from his digital jukebox. If the action ever starts to wind down, a quick turn of his “arming” key and the flick of a switch sends his basement into full-on party mode, which includes more lighting and lasers than any one person should be allowed to own.

[spikec] says that his wife’s eyes were rolling like “uncaged gyros” when he unveiled his controller for the first time – a sign of a job well done. Don’t take our word for it though, check out a video of his control stick and Emergency Party System in action after the jump.

[Ron] was looking for a way to play his MP3s around the house without having to use his computer. He also wanted the ability to remotely control his tunes with an old camcorder remote he had sitting around – not exactly a feature you would find in an off the shelf personal audio player.

Ultimately, he decided to construct his own remote-controlled audio player using a VMUSIC2 audio module, which can decode MP3s from any standard USB drive. The VMUSIC2 is controlled by a Propeller demo board, which also handles receiving and decoding IR signals from his camcorder remote. While he was originally dumping ID3 tag data to his computer for debugging purposes, he recently added an LCD screen for displaying song information in a more useful manner.

The MP3 player seems to work pretty well if the video below is any indication, though it’s begging for a nice enclosure to tie things together. We like the project so far, so we’re sure [Ron] won’t fail to impress when it’s completely finished.

[zmashiah] has a nice Nova tube amplifier in his living room, and he often forgets to turn it off once he’s done listening to music. He feels guilty when this happens, as it not only shortens the lifespan of his stereo, but it’s not exactly the greenest behavior either. Rather than let his receiver idle any longer, he built a simple device that automatically turns it off when he forgets.

He wired an Arduino to the line level output of the receiver, sampling the audio every two seconds. When five minutes pass without an audio signal, the Arduino sends an IR command to the receiver, turning it off.

He says he’s aware that it might be overkill to use an Arduino for this application, but that he would rather fork out an extra dollar or two instead of spending hours poring over AVR assembly code. While we’re all for efficiency, we can’t exactly argue with that logic – time is money!

[zmashiah] is kind enough to include his schematics as well as the code for his project, so be sure to check it out if you occasionally forget to turn off your IR-enabled appliances.

[James] is one of those guys on a quest to control everything with one device. His tool of choice is an Android phone, which can do quite a lot right out of the box. But he was never satisfied with its lack of IR remote control abilities. He fixed that feature-gap by building a Bluetooth to Infrared translator.

The hardware he used for the prototype is quite simple. A cheap serial Bluetooth modem from eBay lets him connect to his phone. An Arduino board listens for data from the modem and converts incoming commands to flashes on an IR LED. Voila, he can control the tube with his phone.

We love the potential of this hack. The Bluetooth module runs from 3.3V, and reading serial data and flashing an LED is extremely simple. You should be able to use a small uC, say an ATtiny13, and a 3.3V regulator to miniaturize the module. We could see this plugging into the USB port on the back of a TV for power, with a wire extension to put the LED into position. The only shortfall is the inability to turn the TV on remotely when drawing power this way.

Remote codes aren’t particularly large to store either. So this would be pretty easy to extend to full control of all IR-compatible home entertainment devices. You just need a tool to discover the remote control codes.

[SpiralBrain] needed to figure out the coding scheme used by an IR remote control so that he could use it with his own project. He built an IR receiver board for the PICkit 2 and figured out how to use some of the Microchip software to measure the timing of the incoming signal.

The hardware’s dead simple; a 38 kHz IR receiver does the heavy lifting by filtering out errant infrared light. When it does detect a signal with the correct frequency the output pin drives the base of a transistor to toggle the input pin on the PICkit 2. The breakout board has a pin header which makes it a snap to detach and store for later use. The PICkit 2 Logic Tool software captures this input, by setting the correct pin as a trigger and choosing a 10 kHz sample rate.

As we discussed in our PIC programming with Linux tutorial, the PICkit 2 really is far superior to its replacement, the PICkit 3. [SpiralBrain] mentions that it is more versatile than the newer version but doesn’t go so far as to tell us whether you can use this hardware with the PICkit 3 or not.