Tag Archives: IRremote

Infrared Receivers – signal lag and distortion

Many electronics enthusiasts will be familiar with how Infrared receivers demodulate IR signals. In this post we show a visualisation of the time lag and distortion of the signals as they pass through the IR receiver for demodulation and noise filtering.  Most DIY projects use the raw timings from the IR receiver to decode individual signals. However, not many will be aware that IR receivers can distort the signal timings by significant amounts. Fortunately, common IR decoders take this into account and compensate for timing distortions introduced by infrared demodulators / receivers.

Infrared Signal, Modulated & De-modulated
Infrared Signal, Modulated & De-modulated

Continue reading Infrared Receivers – signal lag and distortion

Air Conditioners: Recording long Infrared Remote control signals with Arduino

hRecently we have been helping several members on the Arduino forum to record and playback their remote control signals from their Air Conditioners. These signals are typically much longer than those of TVs or common media devices. The 2 most popular libraries for Arduino, IRremote & IRlib are excellent, but have some limitations which we have covered in a previous post. In this post we address one particular issue that is proving challenging to users.

airconremote
Long Infrared signals prove challenging for Arduino users

Continue reading Air Conditioners: Recording long Infrared Remote control signals with Arduino

Arduino: 10 common pitfalls with Infrared Remote Control

Arduino: 10 common pitfalls with Infrared Remote Control
Arduino: 10 common pitfalls with Infrared Remote Control

Over the last few months we have been regular contributors to the Arduino and other forums, answering questions about Infrared remote control projects. It became apparent that beginners typically trip up on many common ‘pitfalls’. So we decided to list off our ‘Top 10’.

 

Continue reading Arduino: 10 common pitfalls with Infrared Remote Control

Latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy and more.

Dublin, Ireland – 31st January 2014. We are happy to announce the latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR to all our backers & supporters. Since the completion of the crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo we have added over 125 updates and enhancements to AnalysIR, with more to come.

AnalysIR Screenshot
AnalysIR Screenshot

A major highlight of this release is full AnalysIR support for USB IR Toy from Dangerous Prototypes (V1 & V2 hardware) for decoding and resending IR signals at all common modulation frequencies. In our opinion, AnalysIR is now the premier GUI supporting DP’s IR toy, not to mention the Arduino, RPi, MSP430 F5529 LaunchPad (beta)  and more. A selection of enhancements in this latest release, include: Continue reading Latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy and more.

Follow up: Custom TV infrared remote control using Arcade style console

For anyone following the progress of our ‘Custom TV Infrared remote control’ for the SKY+ box, we received it back for some upgrading over the last week and tomorrow (weather permitting – there are lots of high winds in Europe today, with many flights being cancelled) it will be flown back to its owner, with several upgrades on board.

 

Custom SKY+ IR Remote control, by AnalysIR
Custom SKY+ IR Remote control, by AnalysIR

Continue reading Follow up: Custom TV infrared remote control using Arcade style console

Constant current infrared LED emitter circuit

Recently, we have been asked several times about driver circuits for IR LEDs, particularly with good range and coverage. Most of us start off driving infrared leds directly from an Arduino or other MCU using a basic resistor in series with the LED connected to a digital output pin of the MCU.

IRsignaltraceRectifierDiodeIN4148
An oscilloscope snalpshot showing a trace of Ve from the constant current circuit shown below.

Continue reading Constant current infrared LED emitter circuit

Custom TV remote control using Arcade style console

  Following on from our previous blog post about SKY+ RC6 IR codes, we have now completed the project and are about to ship to its new owner – a friend of ours.

SR1We purchased a Sega megadrive Arcade style games console which was BNIB for €25 ($35) and disabled all of the built-in gaming functionality. We then wired up each of the 12 available switches (Joystick & Arcade style buttons) to the Arduino Nano which was placed onto an Arduino prototyping shield and mounted to the enclosure using ‘lots’ of hot glue. Note some of these consoles come with an additional 2 buttons, which can bring the total to 14. In addition, the joystick has 8 positions in total of which we used only 4 as it would be too difficult for the user to manage all eight. Continue reading Custom TV remote control using Arcade style console

Crowdfunding Campaign Update – 23rd Oct 2013

Hello Backers,

We have been busy over the last few weeks updating AnalysIR, for you. We hope to make the next release at the end of this month around Halloween.

You may not know that Halloween originated in our part of the world, but we promise not to introduce too many scary features this time 🙂 .

Our next release will include a number of Updates & fixes as follows: Continue reading Crowdfunding Campaign Update – 23rd Oct 2013

Update: IR signal clean feature & news

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