I don’t know about you, but I can never find the remote for my TV. It always seems to disappear whenever I need it and then only turns up days later wedged inside the sofa by one of the kids. One thing do I always have with me though, is my iPhone. My iPhone can happily read my email, browses the internet, plays games and even turns my heating on and off. What would be great is if it could only operate my TV too.
Operating an infra red controlled TV with the iPhone gives us a few problems to solve. Firstly, iPhones aren’t blessed with an IR emitter. Secondly, how do we know what IR codes to broadcast to operate the TV?
If we had a magic box that could read codes from an IR remote, transmit IR codes to a TV and have a network connection to talk to the iPhone, then this could solve our problems. The box wouldn’t have to do much, just handle recording and transmitting IR codes, an App on the iPhone could do all the complicated stuff remembering all the IR codes and sending them at the right time.
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