Category Archives: remote

Bluetooth Automation Remote Hangs Around

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Using your smartphone to control your home automation system gives you a lot of flexibility. But for something as simple as turning the lights on and off, it can be a pain to go through the whole process of unlocking your phone, choosing the right browser page or app, and then finally hitting the button you need. It’d be much simpler if it could all be done at the touch of a single, physical button – but phones don’t have many of those anymore. [falldeaf] brings the solution – a four-button Bluetooth remote for your smartphone that’s wearable, to boot. …read more

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Remote Controlling A Dog

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Until the industrial revolution, humans made use of animals to make our labor easier. This is still seen in some niche areas, like how no machine yet has been invented that’s as good at sniffing out truffles as pigs are. [William] has hearkened back to humanity’s earlier roots, but in a more modern twist has made something of a general purpose dog that could feasibly do any work imaginable. Now his dog is remote-controlled.

[William] accomplished the monumental task in a literally cartoonish fashion using the old trope of hanging a hot dog in front of something’s face to get …read more

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Arduino Lighting Controller With Remote Twist

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The time for putting up festive lights all around your house is nigh, and this is a very popular time for those of us who use the holiday season as an excuse to buy a few WiFi chips and Arduinos to automate all of our decorations. The latest in this great tradition is [Real Time Logic]’s cloud-based Christmas light setup.

In order to give public access to the Christmas light setup, a ESP8266 WiFi Four Relay board was configured with NodeMCU. This allows for four channels for lights, which are controlled through the Light Controller Server software. Once this is …read more

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Control Anything with a Universal Wireless Remote

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If you aren’t already living on the spacecraft Discovery One, you may not have HAL listening to your every voice command. If that’s the case for you, as it is for us, you may have to resort to mashing buttons on little black monoliths like a primitive monkey. [Barnr]’s universal remote project, and some black PLA filament, will get you there in no time.

The remote is based on a nRF24 radios with a PIC to read the button presses. A Raspberry Pi and another nRF24 are listening on the other end. The code that runs either side of …read more

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A Smart Wand for all us Muggles

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Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Even though we know that something isn’t “magic”, it’s nice to see how close we can get. [Dofl] and his friends, big fans of the magic in Harry Potter, thought the same thing, and decided to create a magic wand that they could use themselves.

The wand itself is 3D printed and has a microcontroller and WiFi board, a voice recognition board, a microphone, and a vibrating motor stuffed inside. The wand converts the voice into commands and since the wand is connected to WiFi, the commands …read more

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Learn Some Plastic Techniques With This SNES WiiMote Mod

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Not all hacks have to be deeply technical. Sometimes a good show of skill is just as impressive. [lyberty5] takes two completely different hunks of plastic and somehow epoxies them into a convincing and, most impressively, reliable chimera.

While the WiiMote’s motion controls certainly caused a lot of wordy debate on the Internet when it was debuted. While everyone and their grandmother who owned a game company rushed out to copy and out-innovate it once they saw Nintendo’s hoard of dragon gold. Most game designers had other thoughts about the concept, mostly that it wouldn’t do for a platformer. So …read more

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Reverse Engineering and Networking The A/C Remote Control

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IoT has become such an polarizing, overused term. But here it is in its essence: [zeroflow] had a thing (his airconditioner) and he needed to put it on the Internet.

For his contribution to this modern vernacular atrocity, he first had to build an IR debugging tool and reverse engineer the signals coming from the air conditioner’s remote. He wrote up a really good summary of the process, and worth reading. He loads up an IR library onto an Arduino and dumps the resulting 32 bits of information to his computer. In a process much like filling in the blanks …read more

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