Posted by woow
Posted on September 03, 2017
When you plop down on the coach and realize the remote is nowhere to be found, you have a
few courses of action. You can find it, obviously, or get some sort of couch-mounted holster to ensure it never goes missing again once you figure out where it is. Or, you can forget about watching the boob tube altogether, head for the workshop, and build a new one just for the hell of it.
The Universal Remote 7000 is a delightful little project by tinkerer Justin Emter that uses a homemade circuit and the chip from the Arduino Uno to create a fully-functional remote with physical buttons that lives inside an Altoids tin. As Emter writes in the blog post about the project:
A couple years ago my TV remote broke. I had used one of those universal remote phone apps as an alternative for a while, but that just got really frustrating. Without the tactile feel of buttons it was too easy to press wrong buttons on my smart phone. ...I loved the idea of designing a circuit board from scratch & filling it with circuits. This seemed like the perfect project for me – being able to use my beloved arduino chip, design and populate a circuit board with circuits & fashion some kind of project case (altoids tin) to put it all in. I went for it.
Emter's write-up covers the basics of the project, though not in quite enough detail that you'd be able to replicate itself without some serious electronics knowledge. And maybe that's for the best, since this DIY remote has a few drawbacks, like a battery that dies in about two weeks.
Still, it's a fun little illustration of how—with a little ingenuity, time, know-how, and grit—you can get figure out and replicate just about any gadget you have on hand. From remotes, all the way up to smartphones. Or at the very least, you can see how someone else did it.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a27923/lose-the-tv-remote-just-build-a-new-one/
