Extend the functionality of your TV remote to turn all sorts of things on and off.
The latest project from our intern’s lab is a TV remote relay switcher—the perfect device to prank your room-mate, sibling or partner.
Consisting of a clicker for STM32 (this was done before we released clicker 2), a relay click and an IR click, it lets you set up a regular TV remote (as long as it uses the NEC IR protocol) to activate and deactivate relays. You can assign any button from the remote to act as a switch, while the remote is still used for changing channels on the TV.
So when someone picks up the remote in a hurry, barely in time for the all-important game or sitcom premiere, see that person press a button on the remote that causes the power to go out in the entire room—lights out, including the tv and all, complete darkness and silence.
You won’t be able to hold your giggles in the dark; once the prank victim recovers from the momentary confusion to start chasing you around the room, run. If you get caught, just blame it on Nemanja, the intern who made it all possible.
Although the truth is you had to take a few steps to make it work. In this order: download the Libstock example and plug the whole device into USB. Open the HID terminal in your ARM compiler (under Tools), and select Remote control. Press a button on your remote and you’ll get a number associated with that button. You then just paste it into the example code and boot-load everything to the clicker’s STM32 MCU. Test it out to see if the relays are clicking when you’re pressing the correct buttons on the remote. If everything is OK, proceed to connect the wiring.
If your prank victim still thinks Nemanja is to blame and wants to know where he is, tell him he’s still in the lab. Our hardware seniors assigned him his next project, a bigger challenge.
Your next prank should also be more sophisticated perhaps.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika