Articles tagged “Remote control”
USB remote control receiver for PowerDVD
I enjoy watching films and mainly do so sitting at my desktop PC. This has taught me that cheap office chairs are not the most comfortable things to sit on for extended periods of time, especially when the next room contains a comfortable bean bag and a good place to stick a screen. A gap between the two rooms allows me to pass cables from one to the other, and after purchasing a 10m DVI-D cable and a USB extension lead on eBay I had both picture and sound sorted out (I use a USB sound "card"). This left me with one final problem: how to control the PC through a wall.
Comments ATmega168 ATtiny84 AVR Electronics Remote control USB
Ejecting discs from a damaged camcorder with a remote control
I hope that those of you who celebrate it had a good Christmas break and will have an excellent new year! I recently attempted to repair a DVD camcorder that had been dropped; the eject button no longer worked, though the disc could be ejected by connecting to camera to a PC, right-clicking the DVD drive that subsequently appears in Explorer, then selecting Eject. I started by removing all of the screws around the affected area, but the plastic casing remained strongly held together by some mysterious internal force.
RC-5, NEC, JVC and Panasonic infrared codes
I've rewritten the remote control signal decoding software to handle multiple protocols. As well as SIRCS, it now supports RC-5, NEC, JVC and two Panasonic codes (one "old" 11-bit code and one "new" 48-bit code). There's not much in the way of screenshots at the moment, other than a debug window that gets filled when keys are pressed: NecCommand Address=27526, Command=5, Extended=True, Repeat=1 NecCommand Address=24, Command=87, Extended=False, Repeat=1 RC5Command Address=20, Command=53, Repeat=True,...
Remote controlling Windows the Sony way
It's been a while since I last posted, and unfortunately this post is to do with Sony remote controls again. This time I'm attempting to use Sony (or compatible) remote controls to control software running on a Windows PC. I've recently been watching more films in PowerDVD, and some of the keyboard shortcuts (eg Ctrl+P for the menu) are a little difficult to hit in the dark and from a distance. I have a ready supply of universal remote controls as well as the PlayStation 2 DVD remote control, all of which work with the SIRCS protocol.
Decoding SIRCS commands with a PIC16F84
Some time ago I was working on a simple Z80-based computer. It has a PS/2 keyboard and mouse port for user input, and these are implemented using a large number of discrete parts - transistor drivers with all manner of supporting latches and buffers. The AT protocol (which the PS/2 keyboard and mouse inherit) is entirely implemented in software by the Z80. On the one hand this design has a certain purity, but it ties the CPU up every time data is to be transferred. The keyboard sends data when it feels like it, so if you wished to perform some function based on a key press event you'd need to poll the port periodically, assuming that if communications time out there's no key waiting.
SonyIR
I take a strange enjoyment in reading format and protocol documentation, and I find it to be one of the most rewarding tasks. Hence the Sega emulator project, the DOOM project, the Vgm2Midi project and so on. This project is more hardware related - it's an infrared remote control library for the TI-83 series calculators. It supports the SIRCS (Sony) protocol, with command words of 12, 15 and 20 bits. Video of the library in action (960KB WMV). The hardware is very simple if you just want to transmit, and a single-package infrared receiver/amplifier/demodulator makes the receiving circuit not that much more complex.