Project Home Digital Electronic Control

[nosage]

So I am turning my computer into a universal remote. A project for school I call HDEC. The hardware consists of a home computer with an IR emitter. The software is a computer program that plays WAV files that have the IR signal recorded. So you click on the computer and the TV turns on. Sounds simple.

I am making the program in visual basic.

The hardware is an IR emitter that is designed to hook to an audio out on the sound card. I would like to some how make it USB instead of using the sound card. I still have alot of research to do.

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated! thank you!

 

[electron]

I strongly recommend you pick up one of those USB-UIRT transceivers:

http://www.usbuirt.com/

It even supports multiple zones!

 

[nosage]

wow thanks, i might pick one up to mess with. it seams though that it creates the IR output with hardware. Because of the complexity of IR generation, I was hoping to use software for the IR codes (software as in .WAV recordings).

 

[rocco]

Try a USB sound interface.

USB was originally designed for audio. A device like this:
http://www.usbgear.com/usb-audio-adapter-5/
should be able to drive an IR-LED directly. It will look like a regular sound board to your PC or MAC, so you should be able to send .wav files to it. For $40, you should be able to control 6 IR-LEDs simultaneously.

 

[nosage]

Yeah, Im looking for a schematic for something like that. I maybe need to use a PIC chip for the usb interface. Maybe send the data (somehow) to the usb bus to be picked up by the pic and sent to the IR emitter.

I hooked an IR led to the mic jack on my sound card and I started recording waveforms with sound forge of IR code from a remote, pretty nifty stuff!

 

[nosage]

just a little update...

I try to send the recorded ir code to the speaker out which goes to the LED emitter. and the tv wouldnt turn on. I then took a digital camera and looked at the LED emitter cause a digital camera picks up the light, and there is no light. So, I am assuming that the speaker out does not provide enough volts to push the LEDs. I think I need to hack the wires and hook up pull up resisters or something to increase the voltage.

In the mean while I started with the software in VB.NET. I am learning as I go so it is nothing spectacular yet.

The website

Any comments or suggestions?

 

[nosage]

Another update, we have had a long time to do this and we pretty much got no where. So we are now using girder to hopefully get this sucker working, we picked up a usb device called Tira that works well. So far we recorded the commands we are gunna use and whipped up a nice GUI that has changed about 8 times during the planning phase. Now all that is left is connecting the VB program to work with girder, what we hope to accomplish is having our VB program control girder that can control TVs, DVDs, etc.

I guess theres a plugin called igor which does communication with girder? I have done alot of reseach (but not enough) on what code/plugins I need to talk to girder.

 

[TCassio]

Why reinvent the wheel. I have been doing this with my laptop in my media room for about 6 months. I am using My.tv IR transmitter, connected via USB to my PC, and am using a program called IRCommand. The IR blaster can be found at
http://www.mytvstore.com/ for $39.95. The software can be found at http://www.wdpsoftware.com/ Full registration is $49.95, they have a demo and a lite version. Attached is a screen shot of my Universal Remote on my laptop.

T.