IoT has become such an polarizing, overused term. But here it is in its essence: [zeroflow] had a thing (his airconditioner) and he needed to put it on the Internet.

For his contribution to this modern vernacular atrocity, he first had to build an IR debugging tool and reverse engineer the signals coming from the air conditioner’s remote. He wrote up a really good summary of the process, and worth reading. He loads up an IR library onto an Arduino and dumps the resulting 32 bits of information to his computer. In a process much like filling in the blanks on a word puzzle, he eventually determines which blocks of the data correspond to the remote’s different buttons.

Next he throws an array of IR LEDS and an ESP8266 onto a bit of protoboard. After writing some code, available on GitHub, he could set the temperature of his room from anywhere on the planet. We take it on faith that [zeroflow] has a compelling reason for doing so.

Bolstered by this success, he didn’t stop there. [Zeroflow] admits to having more than one thing on the Internet. Boom! Internet of things.