Via Digital Junky.
Prologue
I recently moved in a new apartment in which the living room lights could be controlled with a remote. Having already played with IR signals in order to incorporate remote control to some of my projects I knew that I would probably be able to emulate the signals sent by the original remote and thus operate the lights of my living room from a web based application.
My first reflex was to think of using an Arduino with a wifi/ethernet shield. I could have used the ever usefull aRest library in order to build a REST api on the microcontroller. The web-app would have been hosted on a remote server and used as an graphical interface in order to make the right calls to the Arduino.
But this time I wanted to take a less low-level approach and it was a perfect opportunity to get my hands on a raspberry pi. With its computing and networking capabilities plus a direct control over the GPIO pins, the pi allows me to run the web-server and manage the IR signals from the same device. Furthermore I can use packages that will make my life so much easier, and use the full potential of the Pi to create a very complete hub for my domotics needs.
What we will be making
The idea is to make a web application that will allow us to easily control our home appliances. The project is based around the Raspberry pi which is used to :
- Record and store the IR signal of the remotes we wish to emulate.
- Play back the signals in memory.
- Host a web-app working as an interface with the IR module.
Additionally, we’ll see how we can leverage the capabilities of the pi in order to add more functionalities to our application.
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