Make your own IR remote that can control multiple devices at once! This took me a bit of time to document, but hopefully people can get something out of it. All necessary files are included below.

The old version of this project can be found on this page.

Demonstration

What is this?

As per the title, this is a learning TV remote. By 'learning', I mean that this remote can learn and remember the signals of almost any remote controls that you have at home. They don't have to exclusively be for your TV, they could be for air conditioning, fans, or any home entertainment devices that have an IR remote.

Currently, a user can record ten different commands to whichever buttons that they want. The remote will go into a low-power sleep mode when not transmitting or recording signals, which will conserve power for a long time. If the remote ever loses power, the commands will remain stored, as they are saved to the persistent memory, EEPROM.

I have mine controlling my air condition, TV and VCR at once. It's really convenient and quite nice to be able to control them all with something that you made yourself.

This was also sold by the UQ Electrically Based Engineering Student Society for students to build.

Why did I do this?

I originally started making this for my grandma because she had too many remotes with too many buttons and realistically only needed a few commands: power on/off, channel up, channel down, volume up, and volume down. I ended making this during the mid-year break in 2015, but it started taking a different direction.

I wanted to help electrical engineering students at uni do more practical projects in their own time because you learn so much by getting your hands dirty. Not only will students be able to solder their own project together, but they will learn about the design process and they would be able to see the power of electrical engineering. I really want students to realise that they can build basically whatever they can imagine with their skills.

It also ended up teaching me about small-medium scale production of electronics, which was valuable.

Files

Here are all the files that you'll need to be able to make the project yourself. There is a very detailed guide included.

Extra Notes

This project was completed in a few different stages. Most of the code was written in mid-late 2015, and then the finished product with the acrylic case was done up in early 2016, just before the start of my final year of electrical engineering.

Through this project, I learnt more about and used skills involving:

-PCB design

-Binary amplitude shift keying

-Huffman coding (data compression)

-Signal processing

-Embedded C programming

-Mass producing electronics and sourcing large amounts of appropriate components for good prices

-Laser cut case design