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How to control a remote using a smart phone

colporteur

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I am looking for suggestions from E14 community members on how to control a remote using a smart phone.

I'm confident someone here has attempted this and actually got it working. I want to use that knowledge. I've combed the internet and found a number of solutions. I want to avoid the rabbit warrens of getting them to work. I'm looking to leverage the community knowledge because you have done it.

The project premise is to connect a smart phone to a controller that actions a remote. My starting point is: how to turn the remote on and off using the smart phone. I use smart phone because I want to keep it broad. It might be an Android or an iphone. I have the latter but my wife has the other. The controller technology is open. I am hoping to use an Arduino of some sort but a single board computer is not out of the solution. The remote in this example is an on/off but maybe it can provide feedback.

This project is for personal use and not to develop a commercial product. There is a limited budget. I'm looking for a cost effective solution not necessarily the cheapest solution. My knowledge level in phone communication is limited. In my project more than one person will be connecting. I've never create a phone app and really don't want to go there. What is simple way of accomplishing that with a phone. I'm not a programmer by training. I've have some skills but would never label myself a programmer.

I'm looking to build a simple solution on the workbench and maybe learn some stuff along the way. I'm looking for suggestions that you know works. Either you have done it yourself or have seen it done and know it works. 

  • in reply to md_steve

    You could train the dog to sit by the front door and react somehow when your wife was five or six houses away. If you trained your dog to recognise vehicles owned by friends, relatives, etc, you wouldn't need any clouds or wi-fi's, your dog would make different noises to tell you who it was. You could call those noises Bark Codes, mwah-ha-haha...

    Seriously though, we had a pet dog called Rex when me and my siblings were young, about 50 years ago. From his actions and responses we saw that he could recognise my 1959 Triumph 500cc Speed Twin approaching from about a mile and a half away, from inside the house, and when the nearby main road was full of rush-hour traffic creating lots of background noise. This happened every time I went home from University for a weekend or a national holiday so we knew it wasn't just coincidence. About three years later he was recognising my brother's 150cc BSA Bantam from afar too. Rex was a marvellous dog, we don't give our animals nearly enough credit for how clever they are.

  • Hello

    most garage doors have a set of contacts which you can add an external switch onto 

    i bought a Shelly relay for operating a light at home from my cell phone 

    sounds like you want to do that 

  • Sounds like adding complications to a system for an undefined reason.
    most remotes send signals via IR. So the first step I would do Is figure out what data the remote is sending.
    you could do this with and IR reciever, and an arduino streaming via serial.
    so you capture all the control signals, then verify them by generating the signals via an IR LED.

    many phones have IR modules, but I guess we are to assume your phone does not.
    By the time you get to this step, you are basically finished.

    sure, you could deconstruct the remote, analyze the MCU signals, hijack the buttons, send controls via an aux MCU, but why?
    Thats harder, and may damage the remote. If you analyze the control signals, the remote can be left intact.

    Having more than one person connect to a single point hardware control.
    (reminds me of an internet controlled robot arm I made in the 1990s. you get 100 people trying to do conflicting things, its all race conditions)
    Manage the hardware control with sessions and ques. running servers via a phone is possible, but not pleasurable in my experience.
    running a server via a computer would be my first choice.
    again, assuming the remote is IR, an IR LED and IR receiver might cost you all of 20 cents, if you cannot find one to pull from e-waste.

    Its all very speculative though. if you post further details, Im sure you can get better assistance.

  • in reply to colporteur

    It is quite easy to use, I had a piece.

  • in reply to me_Cris

    Hummm I was just placing an Ali order. I will report back on progress.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Back in the days of Raspberry Pi 2, I used one to detect the wifi router in my wife's car as she approached the house and send me a text so I could help her bring in the groceries. (OK, I was bored that year.) I found that the Pi picked her up five or six houses away, but by the time a text got to my phone she was parked and juggling bags already. Our dog was faster than the network-to-text conversion time. Perhaps I should have built an app that used the phone's wifi to sense her approach. Next time?

  • in reply to BigG

    I was naive to think there would be a simple solution. I like    video listing. The phone part is what keeps me at bay. I haven't dabbled with them. Having a working solution and not bare metal start is what I was looking for. 

  • in reply to colporteur

    If you treat this like fishing you'll have no bother catching the big one. It starts by choosing the right fly (product) and then spending a bit of time attaching it to the hook (putting the hardware together). Then let your technique and experience do the rest when standing chest deep in water... and, as I'm sure you know, this means having multiple flies in the bag... as the first one you choose might not be the best one.

    Just take little steps and take your time.

  • in reply to colporteur

    Agree, with the phone control with those requirements, it's not a simple product/project, unfortunately, but a whole solution to develop : (

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