Universal Learning IR Remote for Android
In the current development of Smart TVs and Smart Home the communication between these devices gets always more important. Although more and more devices are equipped with Wifi or Bluetooth to communicate, the most common way to communicate are still infrared codes, especially for older devices. This can also be seen in the fact that most of the new smartphones have an IR-transmitter again. So it’s possible to use the smartphone as an universal remote control for TVs, HIFI and many other devices. There are several apps to send IR codes based on online databases, where the supported devices and codes are provided. But if a device isn’t supported, there is no comfortable way to get the desired code. To solve this problem a new app that can learn the codes from the original remote will be developed. As the built-in IR transmitter of the smartphone is not able to act as a receiver, an external IR-receiver based on the Arduino board will be designed. The Arduino will receive the signals and send them over Bluetooth to the smartphone. The codes are encoded in the pronto Hex format and synchronized over an online database to share them between the users of the app. The focus of this work is set on the communication by infrared and Bluetooth. For this a format has to be found that all the invoked devices, in particular the Arduino board, the Android smartphone and for example a TV, can handle and understand.