Eloquent Universal Receiver For Your Home Entertainment Equipment

March 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

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.

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Building A Touchscreen XBMC Setup With The Raspberry Pi

March 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

[Andrei Istodorescu] has been hard at work building a 7″ touch-screen rig which runs XBMC. It may be upside-down, but the Raspberry Pi board which is front and center is still easily recognizable. There’s a lot of stuff connected to it in order to pull this off, and even more software configuration. But as you can see in the clip after the break he did get it working!

The screen is an eGalaxy 7″ touch sensitive module he picked up on eBay. It sounds like it was meant for a backup camera in the dashboard of a car. He compiled his own Linux kernel to add support for the screen. It uses HDMI for the video interface with the driver board, and the touchscreen connects to one of the USB ports. The rest of the setup involves compiling XBMC with touchscreen support and calibrating the screen to accurately sense input.

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Adding A Home Theater Without Ruining A Victorian Home

February 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

projector-screen-in-a-victorian-home We understand where [John Clarke Mills] is coming from when he says he wants a home theater but not at the expense of dedicating a room to it. His situation is a bit more sticky than most folks in that he has a beautifully kept Victorian era home. Recently he was removing a renovation from ages past that didn’t fit with the style and it gave him the opportunity to build in this hidden projector screen.

Years ago someone walled in this opening and added french doors. After opening up the wall [John] sized up the situation and decided he had just enough room to build a soffit which could hide a rolled up projection surface. He purchased a motorized screen (we’ve seen a few diy projection screens but can’t remember one that rolls up) and built a slot into the design just large enough for the screen to pass through. He’s testing it out in the clip after the break before doing the plaster work.

The columns on either side are his additions as well. The floor of the house is unlevel and one of those columns ended up a full inch longer than the other. We certainly can’t tell.

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HDMI Breakout Lets You Sniff HDCP Crypto Keys

February 18, 2013 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

There’s two really useful parts to this hack which involves sniffing the HDMI protocol’s HDCP security keys. The first is just getting at the signals without disrupting communications between two HDCP capable devices. To do so [Adam Laurie] started by building an HDMI breakout cable that also serves as a pass-through. The board seen above is known as an HDMI screw terminal board. The image shows one cable connecting to itself during the fabrication process. What he did was cut one end off of an HDMI cable, then used a continuity tester to figure out which screw terminal connects with which bare wire. After all the wires are accounted for the end with the plug goes to his TV, with a second cable connecting between the board’s socket and his DVD player.

The rest of his post is dedicated to sniffing the security keys. His weapon of choice on this adventure turns out to be a Bus Pirate but it runs a little slow to capture all of the data. He switches to a tool of his own design, which runs on a 60MHz PIC32 demo board. With it he’s able to get the keys which make decrypting the protected data possible.

Automatic Volume Control Puts The Kibosh On Loud TV Commercials

February 11, 2013 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

automatic-tv-volume-control

If you’re having a hard time tuning out those loud commercials why not let your electronics project do it for you? This is an Arduino-based setup which adjusts television volume when it goes above a certain threshold. It uses a microphone, rather than a direct audio signal, so you can set it based on what is actually heard in the room.

The control scheme uses the IR LED and IR receiver seen on the breadboarded circuit above. The receiver lets you teach your volume up and down buttons from your remote control to the system. The one failing we see in the design is that the volume level is hard-coded, requiring you to flash new code to make adjustments (perhaps an enterprising reader could add a potentiometer for making easy adjustments?).

We can’t help but be reminded of the setup which reads the closed caption info to mute topics you’ve added to a blacklist.

Add Motorized Blinds To Your Home Theater

February 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

motorized-blinds

[Chipsy] found himself with an interesting problem. The room that serves his home theater has a wall mirror which reflects part of the screen during viewing. In an otherwise dark room this was very distracting. His solution was to add a blind that covers the mirror during viewing, but who wants to constantly pull that down and back up again? Since the motorized projection screen he is using has a remote control he figured out a way to motorize the blind and synchronize it with the screen’s remote.

The screen uses mechanical relays to switch the motor. He patched into these with an Arduino to detect whether the screen was going up or down. It was easy enough to use his own relay and motor with the blind, but he needed a way to stop the blind once it was in position. For covering up the mirror he simply sets an 18 second timer, but for retracting the blind he wanted precise alignment so he added a magnet and sense its position with a reed switch. See the synchronized screen and blind in the clip after the break.

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Coffee Table Arcade Hides Its Controls

January 16, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

arcade-coffee-table-with-self-hiding-controls

[Hoogen] did a fantastic job of building arcade hardware into this Ikea coffee table. Sound familiar? We just looked at another Ikea coffee table arcade, but this one goes quite a different route. It uses a Ramvik table which has a very deep drawer in the end where the controls are located. The image to the left shows that you’re going to have a problem with the joystick when you try to close it. [Hoogen] came up with a clever mechanism to overcome this issue.

This is not an emulated system. It uses a JAMMA board called the iCade 60-in-1 to bring sixty classic arcade games to the build. To interface with this hardware [Hoogen] included a JAMMA full cabinet wiring harness. The inset image on the right is pretty small, but it shows the speaker mounted in the back of the drawer, as well as the control surface angled down. This tilting surface is what allows the controls to move out of the way when closing the drawer. This happens automatically as described by [Hoogen] in his write-up.