All posts by User Two

Infrared Component Kits

AnalysIR Blog, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We have decided to offer a small number of Infrared Component Kits to help users of AnalysIR get started quickly. As a minimum you will require 1 IR receiver to use AnalysIR, plus we highly recommend the ‘IR Learner’ below if you also want to measure modulation frequency.

(Note: This is an updated copy of the original document from the crowd-funding campaign. The original document can be found here.)

IR receivers/emitter in Infrared Component Kits:

Model Frequency Description Gain Typical Application
TSSP4038 38kHz 1 x IR receiver Fixed Gain Barrier + AnalysIR
TSMP58000 20 -> 60kHz 1 x IR receiver – Learner + AnalysIR
TSOP4436 36kHz 1 x IR receiver AGC 4 RC5/6
TSOP34438 38kHz 1 x IR receiver AGC 4 NEC
TSOP4840 40kHz 1 x IR receiver AGC 2 SONY
TSOP2256 56kHz 1 x IR receiver AGC 2 RCA
TSAL6100 All 1 x IR emitter – IR LED transmitter

AGC 2: Standard Applications
AGC 4: Very Noisy Environment

Kits do not include AnalysIR

Select one or more kits from the following:

Item Kit A Kit B Kit C Kit D Kit E Kit F
TSSP4038 Y Y Y Y Y Y
TSMP58000 Y Y Y Y Y Y
TSOP4436 Y Y Y Y
TSOP34438 Y Y Y Y
TSOP4840 Y Y
TSOP34156 Y
TSAL6100 Y Y Y Y Y
Bonus Gift see 11
below		 Y Y Y Y Y Y
Shipping see 9
below		 Y Y Y Y Y Y
Student Tip Y Y Y Y Y Y
Perk Price $8 $10 $10 $12 $13 $15

 Y = Included

Instructions:

  1. Select the kit you want based on the items included
  2. For example, Kit A contains 1 x TSSP4038, 1 x TSMP58000, plus shipping (see 9 below) and a small tip/gratuity for the student.
  3. Then purchase the kit or kits you want by contributing the relevant cost (or sum for multiple kits)
  4. To purchase Kit A just make  an $8 payment  via the PayPal button on this page. To purchase multiple kits just make one contribution to the same perk for the total amount.
  5. If you select Kit B or Kit C then include  a message on PayPal to clarify which perk you want.
  6. These component Kits do not include AnalysIR.
  7. Cost increased (Sep 2014) due to increase in postage.
  8. TSOP4438 replaced with more modern TSOP34438.
  9. Shipping: is included in price above, provided you are also buying AnalysIR or have bought AnalysIR previously. Otherwise, add $5 to the prices above (once only) for worldwide shipping.
  10. Delivery, usually takes from 5->10 working days. There may be some exceptions to this – depending on location.
  11. Bonus gift: We also include a selection of useful components, with all kits, to help with your IR projects. (2 x NPN + 8 x resistors … enough to complete a good Infrared emitter circuit for longer range)

Notes:

  1. Please feel free to order these parts directly your-self. We won’t be offended in any way. We are not offering these to make any $$$ at all. In fact it is much less work for us if backers have or supply their own components.
  2. Kit A, B or C is more than adequate for most users.
  3. Standard shipping worldwide for owners of AnalysIR is included, Otherwise add an extra $5, as per Instruction 9 above.  Postage is not tracked or insured. Unfortunately, we cannot provide any replacements for items mislaid in the post or delivery failures. Due to the low value, we do not expect that there would be customs charges etc.  and if there are any you will have to cover this cost.
  4. We have included a small tip/gratuity for the student who has agreed to pack & post these perks.
  5. This perk is intended as a quick start aid for backers.
  6. These perks will be posted from Dublin, Ireland and typically take 5-10 working days depending on worldwide destination.
  7. You can select multiple kits.
  8. All kit IR components are from Vishay, who are a leading supplier of high quality components. We use them all the time for IR components.
  9. We have allowed for the Sales Tax, IGG, PayPal, Currency & inward shipping charges which will be levied on us for these components.
  10. We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to alter or replace any component if it is not available when we order them. However, we will do our best to match functionality as much as is reasonable. Hopefully this won’t be an issue.
  11. We have not included any Arduinos as they are freely available online. Many of these kit components are not easily available in quantities of 1, without excessive mark-ups, high minimum orders or postage.
  12. Shipping will be to PayPal registered address. (Let us know, immediately, if you want it sent to an alternative address)
  13. Use the Contact Form to contact us, directly.

E.&O.E.

Update: New IR component kit perks & 80+ backers

AnalysIR Blog, Crowdfunding & Backers, , , , , , , , , ,

Today we have added a new perk of IR starter kits and retired some of the other perks.

The kits are provided as a quick starter aid for backers who dont have IR receivers to hand. Please note that a learner IR receiver is required to measure the modulation frequency and at least one IR receiver is required otherwise (=Kit A).

Of course you can still use the powerful import/export feature without any Arduino or IR receiver connected.

Please feel free to purchase your own components directly. Otherwise we have a student ready to do all the leg work for a small bribe (oops I meant Tip).

On the technical side of things – we have greatly improved the performance, design & implementation of the Arduino based code along with some User Interface improvements, over the last few days .

Finally, a big welcome to our latest backers and thanks again to all our 80+ backers.

Update: AnalysIR Auto-clean feature for IR signals

AnalysIR Blog, Arduino, Crowdfunding & Backers, , , , , , , , ,

Here is a screenshot showing the new automatic signal cleaning feature in AnalysIR. You will notice in channel 2 (yellow & red) where I have overlaid the recorded signal from CH1 (green) on top of the cleaned signal in CH2 (yellow). The green & red signal is the recorded signal & the yellow signal is the ‘cleaned’ signal.

AutoClean_screenshot
Screenshot of AnalysIR – Auto-clean feature

Note: Use CTRL+, CTL-, or CTRL0   –   to zoom in & out on most browsers
The reason for the signal degradation in the first place is due to the way all IR receivers work. Typically, marks will be shorter and spaces will be longer. Also, weak IR signals will also alter the duration of marks/spaces.

Combined with AnalysIR’s sensitivity setting for decoding it is possible to rebuild a perfect signal from a really poor signal.

With this new ‘Bonus Feature’, we can export almost perfect signals from AnalysIR and re-import the exported signal to compare against the original recorded signal. This will be a great benefit when designing IR devices or circuits.

Update: IR signal clean feature & news

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After the great news of reaching the initial target on IGG today, I wanted to give a few more updates.

1: AnalysIR has been invited by one of the leading IR equipment manufacturers to join their global partner programme. We hope this will open up access to a potentially huge user base for AnalysIR gong forward with great benefits for both partners. This would not have been possible without the great support from our backers.

2: We wanted to update everyone on our progress with export in Global Caché command format. Well after some initial mistakes using IRremote to generate the signals for a SKY HD remote, we finally succeeded in verifying that the export works with GC equipment, with the help of one of our backers, who happens to have this equipment installed. (Unfortunately, we didn’t have a SKY remote control available)

As part of the debugging process in this exercise, we decided to implement a new feature, to clean up the recorded signal, which means that we can now export almost perfect signals from any signal decoded by AnalysIR, even if it is imported via another format. With this additional ‘Bonus Feature’, we can record or import a very poor signal and recondition it into a perfect signal for export – automatically. We believe our methodology for this could be patentable, but unfortunately we don’t have the resources for this, at this time.

The really good news is that AnalysIR played a key role in debugging & identifying the silly error we made initially.

So now AnalysIR can import & export in the following formats:

–  IRremote

–  IRLib

–  Pronto

–  Global Caché GC-100

–  Global Caché iTach (*)

–  Global Caché GC-IRL (*)

–  Global Caché GC-IRE (*)

(*) = Export not yet verified with physical device.

3: As we indicated just over a week ago, we are now implementing a feature freeze on AnalysIR from today. This will allow us to complete some ‘in-progress’ features and allow us to concentrate on testing, documentation & packaging AnalysIR for release. We would still like to hear any new feature requests from backers for inclusion in later releases & additional import/export formats. Just send us a comment, message via IGG or email.

Finally, we are considering adding some new perks over the next few days and may be retiring some of the existing perks. ….more later

Well another truly amazing day – have now reached 60 backers for AnalysIR.

AnalysIR Blog, Crowdfunding & Backers, Projects, , , , , ,

Today we tested out the new export feature with one of our backers who had lost a remote control for a cool RGB light, but had previously recorded the NEC (extended) codes using IRremote. As a first test of the new export facility, we were able to read the NEC codes into AnalysIR & then export them into Pronto format because our backer had a smart-phone app & IR blaster that only takes Pronto codes as input.rgblamp

 

Getting the codes into AnalysIR was easy, because we happened to have a similar remote in our collection, which had many of the same codes. Otherwise we would have used an Arduino IR library to generate the IR signal for AnalysIR.

What was really impressive is that this all worked first time. Happy us & happy Backers.

We hope to do similar tests with all the other export formats this week, including Global- Cache commands.

Finally, a big welcome & thanks to all our new backers!

Update: More good news today & another Bonus feature!

AnalysIR Blog, Crowdfunding & Backers, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

More good news today & another Bonus feature!

The news is that today AnalysIR was accepted into the Microsoft BizSpark programme, which will help us out in our development efforts on the MS platform along with lots of other goodies.

The Bonus feature is the addition of support for Importing of Global Caché commands in GC-100, iTach, GC-IRL & GC-IRE formats into AnalysIR. This was suggested by one of our backers & we hope to close the loop by supporting export as well (Time permitting).

An interesting point is that GC sells a learning device (like an RS-232 dongle) for importing IR signals and it costs circa $100 on Amazon. It looks like when we get the export feature working, AnalysIR with an Arduino will be able to a lot lot more than this $100 device.

So the list of formats now supported for import includes:

– IRremote
– IRLib
– Pronto CCF
– Global Caché GC-100
– Global Caché iTach
– Global Caché GC-IRL
– Global Caché GC-IRE

and we may add a couple more in the initial release. We also hope to support export of these protocols from AnalysIR – time permitting. This means that you will have a generic device than can record & decode via the Arduino – plus convert to/from all these formats. Impressive!

Thanks to our backer who has a Global Caché device and is willing to test the AnalysIR export once it is available.

Update: Bonus feature – IR Chart Analytics for AnalysIR

AnalysIR Blog, Crowdfunding & Backers, , , , , ,

Today we have added another bonus feature to AnalysIR – a colour coded chart which displays the distribution of Marks & Spaces of an IR signal, including an option to select the granularity of each time slot measured (from 10 to 1,000 uSecs). We have included a screenshot below of an NEC signal at 50 uSecs time slots and the chart shows the number of Mark/Spaces for each time range found.

chartscreenshot
Screenshot of AnalysIR Analytics feature

This feature has a number of potential uses:

– Makes decoding new protocols easier, because you get a quick analysis of the pulse lengths (marks & spaces) in the signal.

– Can immediately show problems with your IR receiver, transmitter, encoding or decoding circuit/logic. For example, in the chart above the space for a ‘1’ bit should be 1,690 uSecs and it’s shown on the graph as being spread out between the 1550 to 1700 time slots. This is not normally a big issue as most decoders will allow a reasonable margin of error when decoding, but it can help to highlight issues when designing.

– Using the image save option means you can export the chart and use in reports, blogs or presentations.

Thanks again to all our backers who used the IGG referrals option for AnalysIR. It has had a real impact. (We are now ranked in the top 10 Technology projects on IGG which have reached over 75% of target!  – ahead of many bigger projects Keep sharing your AnalysIR referral link.  See earlier post re referrals)

And finally, keep your feature suggestions coming!

 

PS: You should be able to zoom in/out of an image using CTRL ‘+’, CTRL ‘-‘ or CTRL ‘0’ in most desktop browsers.

Screenshot: Import feature & Global Support for AnalysIR

AnalysIR Blog, Crowdfunding & Backers, , ,

Another quick update to let you know that we have also included Pronto code import, as a bonus feature today, in addition to the other 2 formats in the post earlier today.

As we were testing the pronto code import, we came across another protocol from Pioneer based on the NEC protocol, but with different timings. So we also included support for this Pioneer protocol into AnalysIR.  This import facilty is really superb, only sorry we didnt do it earlier 🙂

A screenshot is included below and in full resolution under the Gallery tab (click on image).

ImportScreenShot
Screenshot of AnalysIR Import feature

A big Welcome and Thanks to our latest backers. We now have over 50 supporters from at least 11 countries spread across the continents of North & South America, Australia and Europe as follows:

Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Romania
United Kingdom
United States

Apologies, if we missed anyone.

Maker Faire – Timelapse & RFE deadline

AnalysIR Blog, Arduino, Crowdfunding & Backers, Projects, , , , , ,

Created on the Timelapseberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi-based timelapse camera (AnalysIR is on the right)

PS: As I was typing this timelapse sequence of Maker Faire last week just arrived, which shows the AnalysIR stand on the right. (looks like it can only appear at the top of an update)

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Great News!

Yesterday we successfully managed to import from the RAW/DUMP output of the 2 main Arduino IR libraries (IRremote & IRLib). To use it’s very simple, just copy and paste all of the text output and paste into AnalysIR. Simple! You then get a graphical display of the signal and the option to save it to disk as part of the session History. We will continue to test over the coming weeks and maybe even add another import source. Suggestions Welcome!.

You may ask – why is this feature useful when AnalysIR can just record and decode and save the signal directly. Well there happens to be a huge resource across the Internet of pre-recorded signals from all sorts of tools & devices, and it may be beneficial to import them into one place for comparison or troubleshooting. Another use would be to help others who are looking for help on support Forum(s) etc. Once the signal is imported into AnalysIR, you can then export an image of the signal trace (or plot) which could also have advantages in education.

Now that the end date is on the Horizon, we are finalising our release plans. So if there are any feature requests, from backers we would like to hear about them in the next 3-5 days at the latest, so that we can include them in the initial release(if feasible).