This is a greatt solution to a problem i know all too well. In our gallery, I had a broken down old PC that booted into a Linux media system that I had hacked to just come on and play the media. The artists would need to give me their media and I'd copy it on to a hard drive before the exhibition. But once it was prepared, it was a one switch job. Some of the volunteers in our gallery would still play "I don't understand how to do technical stuff" and not bother switching it on.
There's a good, strong and perennial market for the rememberizer in home care. Seriously, When caring for my dad, we would have used it daily. One time I took if for two months to Japan and he couldn't watch the horse races for 57 or those 60 days.
Great project Leo, clearly explained as always. There are lots of folk confused by umpteen remotes. How about packaging your box so their tech-savvy grandkid can teach it once, then when Granny messes up or loses a remote down the sofa she can reconfigure everything back to what she's familiar with? Maybe add a relay-controlled mains socket to plug a power strip into, so the box can even repower the TV and everything else then reconfigure it all. It's important for these people that, once the box is trained, it offers a single, "Fix Everything" button and minimal status indications: the Creeping Feature Creature's what causes them problems, so keep it ruthlessly away from the solution.
I always wanted to create a universal remote control for a living area, where you could power your Air-conditioned, your tv, and anything else through an HTTP protocol. The hardest part for me was something that could learn these signals.
Found this video on Odysee ... it had all of one view ... glad to see that here on youtube, that is not the reality, because this video (and your others) are gold nuggets for learning electronics. The other day, I was using a fan that I have that is a vertical standing fan and I had it blowing air over my 3D print bed in order to cool it down faster after a print because the glass won't release the print until it has sufficiently cooled down, and forcing the print off the glass before it lets go is not good for the coating that helps the glass hold onto the print. And it happens to be true that this fan can be controlled with an IR remote. So since I print from Octoprint that is installed on a raspberry Pi, I thought it would be a good idea to figure out the IR codes of the remote, then let the Pi run some code at the end of a print job that turns the fan on so that the cooldown process can happen as quickly as possible. The remote for the fan turns out is missing, so I contacted the company and ordered a replacement which should be here any day now. Where I am unsure about this little project, is how I am going to go about recording the remotes IR signals so that I can play back what will end up being the power button and the speed button which have to be pressed two times once the power is turned on. I've messed with IR codes and Arduino's in the past but its been a couple of years. I remember utilizing a library that ended up helping me store codes for a remote for a specific TV, but I also remember struggling with actually doing that and also with understanding the nature of IR codes in general and of course the various ways that different companies implement their commands as each company seems to prefer using their own style instead of everyone adhering to a single standard ... certainly there are enough options in terms of HEX numbers that can be sent over an IR signal that could also be confined to a single format in terms of the timing of pulses within a command code ... but no one seems to have ever been interested in creating nor adhereing to any kind of a standard. Back when I worked on that little project I remember thinking to myself, "Why can't I just record the raw code and store it then play it back?" But the actual doing of that eluded me or I wasn't able to figure it out. Your comments in this video has given me some ideas, but I would love to see your code that records the signal so that I can save myself the headache of reinventing the wheel ... assuming I can reinvent the wheel in the first place. 🙂
@@leosbagoftricks3732 I've never heard of Odysee ... someone linked your video in a Discord channel and said that you presented well organized and explained electronics projects so I clicked and discovered Odysee at the same time. I am noticing that they seem to be really just a mirror of what people post on youtube ... so Im not exactly sure what they're all about in the first place.
@@leosbagoftricks3732 Also, Ive been thinking about my little project since posting my first response and I think what I might try and do is just record the pulses from the remote and mark the timing between pulses in the square wave ... then use the long start sequence as the marker for the beginning of the command and just replay it based on that ... seems like a logical approach to me anyway. Having the definition of the protocol would certainly help ... but if I remember correctly, most of those little generic IR remotes tend to rely on the NEC protocol spec.
I tried to capture a signal burst from an IR remote for funsies. Lacking a phototransistor i just used a an IR led as sensor. I tried to eliminate all parasitic capacitance and inductivity short of cutting the led's leads down (needed that specific wavelength for something else). What was surprising to me is that the 38KHz signal appeared demodulated with just a little bit of 38KHz ripple left. I had a receiver module stapped to channel 2 and was comparing the signals in overlay. So my take away is that in order to just simply program the mcu you don't need a fancy receiver, more than that since the mcu can switch from input to output and also drain (depending on the model) you can build everything with just an IR led.
Interesting idea. Since you seem to be into creeping featurism :-) you could design the board to accommodate both the off-the-shelf learning remote part and your implementation of it (and only populate one or the other).
This was something similar to what I wanted to make at some point, so cool to see the design and how you approached the problem. As always, it was not as simple as I initially thought!
I'd personally be happy if you open sourced it. I mean, there are other things you could do with it, but I think the best practical application for something like this is to integrate the code and infrastructure into other types of projects and have it be possible to do it flexibly. I understand that you might want to make money off of it of course, but I do think that making it broadly available would have the most overall positive outcomes in some ways.
This is a super undervalued channel; great stuff as usual! I'm not sure this would be of general use enough as a product... maybe packaged as with some other purpose?
Hi Leo. Loving the channel. I made up a little customised TV-B-Gone unit with on/off codes for some touring exhibitions I had been working on. It allowed the invigilator to just walk into the middle of the show and press a button to turn all screens on or off. The Rememberizer is much nicer. It would be great as a shield. You could build up a library of commands and make sequences. Nice simple Scratch-like UI... Sorry, creeping on the features! Shield!
Good advice for your students. Nothing worse than a video installation showing a Windows error message box or your Desktop with some old shopping lists.
For feature creep, seems like it would be nice to add power on/off, and maybe even a timer. I was thinking of how to power it-- I guess you assume a power strip with 5V adapter, turned on with the TV. You could use a USB Y power cable to tap the USB port, but then you couldn't turn the TV on without a battery. I was trying to figure out the amplified input. Instead of AGC looks like you have a fixed gain, but I did not spend much time analyzing the bias circuitry. Looks like you have a 1/5s averaged output to use with 2 ADC inputs operating like a comparator.
Yes- I am using the comparators, not the ADC, one comparator input gets the integrated signal as a reference, and the second input gets the signal, offset a bit.
Automated IR replay .. nice :) On the boot does it also record delay till first command (to wait till the controlled stuff boots up) ? I see this as wherry niche product and target customer demands it to be super cheep, so how to sell no idea(have that same problem myself). I would say make it easy to replicate and OpenSource, so maybe someone will find it and use it.
Lay the foundation for commercializing your channel first. Ie put out a "shop", set up a patreon. Start selling plans, complete kits (schematic, pcb layout) but nothing physical. Once it is done, and you still have free time, than you can start thinking about actual physical goods selling. Still then, would make more sense to partner up someone with retail experience, because it is a real hassle. Been there done that. Many years since, I still have a room full with leftover stuffs I never sold or even went into sale (beta products, first batches, etc). It is just too much hassle. Just try to stay on virtual goods. Or at least tick every boxes in virtual space (shop, plans, patreon) before endeavouring into physical goods. Then start with selling pcbs (some pcb manufacturers offer amazon-like affiliate link, so you don't need to ship yourself), then sell the preprogrammed MCU (it a real entry-barrier if you need to program the mcu yourself, especially if its not a popular one, like the atmega8 series), then you can sell complete kits (pcb+preprogrammed mcu+all the parts: user soldering required). And after that you can start selling the assembled units. But it requires heavy marketing to be able to outsource it to an assembly house, and be able to make larger batches (100-500-1000 units/batches). It requires some media growth first. Just my two cents, and sorry for the long babbling.
Oh, and thanks for the great content. Really like your newborn channel still in its undiscovered state when there is not much noises. Feels more personal:) I never comment on big channels, just too much noise, too many people. In fact yours is the first channel I ever commented on youtube (since 2006).
I'm surprised you were able to get the high frequency carrier with just a simple phototransistor setup like your original design. In my experience, the bandwidth of the phototransistor wasn't good enough to reliably pick up the carrier unless you got the remote at just the right distance (It really makes you respect all the work going on in those remote receiver chips!). How finicky is your design to receiving the remote carrier? I was able to get something fairly reliable using a photo transistor with a cascode stage (it seems the miller effect is a big part of the poor bandwidth of the phototransistors). A photodiode with a good transconductance amplifier might be better from a bandwidth perspective, not sure though.
You are right that it's entirely non-trivial to recover the carrier frequency. My setup uses a single transistor amp feeding the analog comparator inside the micro, it is biased to a few millivolts so it's sensitive enough. Alternatively, you can buy wideband IR receiver units designed for "universal remotes". The key is not expecting the same level of sensitivity that a normal remote system has, you really need to get it close and pay attention to the beam alignment.
@@leosbagoftricks3732 Thanks. Looking at your circuit a bit closer with the knowledge that it is few millivolts threshold, I think the filtering of C5 and C6 are probably pretty important. The C5 by my estimation is a high pass filter with roll off about 20khz and the C6 is a very low frequency low pass filter. So that should produce a fairly flat signal with just the high frequency blips riding on top of it. In my earlier tinkering with this I was seeing alot of level drift depending on how long the modulated pulse is, but I think that high pass filter will help mitigate alot of those sorts of problems.
It could be a range of products: You could make it a shield, containing everything but the processing unit. Or, at minimum, just the phototransistor and amplifier. For non-electronics tinkerers, it could be a range of blackbox products with varied feature sets. Depending on extent of complexity of setups it would have to support, it would need different levels of interaction with its human operator. E.g. for longer sequences it might need some troubleshooting facility, like single-stepping through command sequence, editing it, or even indicating the number of command in sequence. For users which may need multiple setups, there would be a need for keeping, distinguishing, and selecting wanted sequence.
You could sell that but not at a retail level. You seem to have a large social circle of like minded people. Have the circuit made in batches at a board shop. I suspect pcbway would sponsor it just for views. Win win.
