The One Day Remote

In an effort to inhibit sound from a wall-mounted television from propagating through to the adjacent bedroom, I pieced together an amplifier to drive two external speakers down the back of the living room.

With some scrounging around, I found an old RC volume control kitset from an issue of Silicon Chip magazine, so in this went. I also found various old remotes, but alas, not one using the required RC-5 protocol (not to be confused with the similarly named cipher). What was I to do? …hunt around for weeks for such a remote? Perhaps try my luck on an unbranded “universal” jobby? No. Well, actually yes to the latter, but unfortunately Murphy had his way. Go figure.

Soln: Make a crude RC-5 remote to train a professionally designed programmable remote.

With a few hours to spare, some stripboard, and some salvaged parts, I came up with the One Day Remote:

..and it worked first go. Take that, Murphy!

This baby has the grunt of a 32 bit ARM clocked at 48 MHz (LPC1111, ext. 12 MHz crystal). Overkill for a standalone remote, but certainly fit for training something more suitable.

At the risk of getting too technical, I’ve simply linked the self-explanatory source code. You’ll need cr_startup_lpc11.c  (by Code Red) and CMSIS 1.3 libs, both of which are supplied with the LPCXpresso IDE. The LPCXpresso dev. kit should work fine and only costs a few $.

Now to buy a remote 🙂