Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#2What a superb article.
I clicked expecting something about learning/repeating IR codes… but no, this is a level above!
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#3grug love dumb devices. not only understandable by grug brain, simple design help trap complexity demon. when it come to devices around home -- tv, thermostat, etc. -- complexity demon only make things worse. plus hide more insidious demons, like spyware demon, etc.
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#4[deleted]
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#5Using Pico to get state from LED lights is ingenious. Mad props! If you just want to control infrared devices and set their state without first reading their state (like any standard IR remote), looking into BroadLink RM4 Mini. Works with almost everything I've thrown at it.
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#6Good post. Honestly though, I’m more interested in making smart devices dumb. Rip out their Wi-Fi hardware etc.
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#7I've had thoughts of a project for making my TV smart but never got started on it.
I think developing a ML vision model for detecting commercials during sporting events or detecting YouTube ads and when the skip ads button appears would be a fun and not too complicated project.
But connecting it to hardware with an infrared remote seemed significantly harder and this project confirms my worry.
It might still be possible in software with a software Roku remote, I briefly looked into what it takes to write apps on there and was able to control my Roku over WiFi. But would be nice to not have to depend on it.
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#8The ESP32 has a built in infrared decoder/encoder, I wonder if you could just skip the intended IR LED that it's supposed to drive and just wire it directly to the receiver pins on the target device with an appropriate resistor. That's the same thing going on here except using the PIO (which was cool to see explained and makes me want to play with the 2040W) and I have an air purifier I kinda want to smarten up...
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#9Amazing article! The next step is to create an automation script to navigate the menus and selecting the content you want!
Also, thanks to this article I learned of wokwi which is amazing!!
Re: Hijacking infrared to make a dumb device smart
#10Good post. Honestly though, I’m more interested in making smart devices dumb. Rip out their Wi-Fi hardware etc.
I find it easier to start with a dumb device. However as that increasingly looks not so possible for TVs, I'd love to see somebody document the process for what you propose.