Best hardware for this homebrew universal remote?

May 27, 2009 6:07 AM

What hardware should I use to build this networked universal remote?

I want to build a universal remote which will work as follows. An IR transmitter is connected to a headless CPU, which is running a webserver. By connecting to the webserver (via an iPhone, for example) one can issue IR signals to control a plethora of AV components.

The simplest way to achieve this would be an Asus eeePC or a Mac Mini running apache, with something like this as an IR transmitter/receiver. However this seems like overkill. What's the neatest off-the-shelf hardware solution you can think of?

posted by unSane to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You could buy a Logitech Sqeezebox and make use of the IRBlaster plugin.

The squeezebox is powered by an open source web interface, which include a number of skins that work well with an iPhone.

I own several squeezeboxen and love them, but never used the IR blaster, but thought it might be what you are looking for.
posted by ben30 at 6:49 AM on May 27

I noticed you mentioned iPhone and was reminded of this uiremote

They have a mailing list and hope to release the add on soon.
posted by moochoo at 6:53 AM on May 27

Seems like you could easily hook up an IR LED to an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield. Set it up to receive data from the network which will cause the LED to flash in a certain sequence.

You could write very simple applications that would just directly connect to this device, bypassing the need for a web server and web browser.
posted by odinsdream at 7:47 AM on May 27

Go find an old gameboy color and flashcart. They had an IR port and I know I've seen a few people make them into homebrew universal remotes. There's a serial port hack you can maybe use to go from serial to USB, and plug that into the Wii running Linux you happen to own. From there, you've got plenty of options...
posted by pwnguin at 10:21 AM on May 27