Infra-Red Controller Software for Home Automation
Senior Project: 2000-2001
Web Mountain Technologies is a Colorado-based business developing communication
products for the small office, home office, and residential environments. Their
NetPlace product provides a homeowner with a simple, common sense home
automation system. The existing product controls various electrical components
in homes via the X.10 protocol. A server acts as the controlling unit for all
actions performed on these components. A GUI, running from any web browser, can
be used to control devices from remote locations as well as from inside the
user's home.
One problem Web Mountain developers faced is the problem of controlling
audio/video equipment that does not have an industry standard for communication
between components. One way to solve this problem was through the use of
infrared (IR) signals. The goal of the project was to add IR control to
NetPlace.
The core of the project entailed programming a digital signal processor (DSP)
on a PCI card to decode infrared signals and relay them to the server. The
server then locates this signal in a database and sends the corresponding
signal out to the appropriate device. Each home or small business would have a
NetPlace server (containing the PCI card) that has central control over all
audio and video infrared devices.
The server has two operating states, a Learn mode and a Play mode. In the
initial Learn mode, the server "learns" the infrared remote signals and
populates the database. In Play mode, the server regenerates these stored IR
signals and sends them out to the proper device. The existing user interface
that controls appliances and lights currently will be updated by Web Mountain
to accommodate the new IR components. The DSP is programmed in low-level C,
while the user interface is programmed in HTML and Perl.
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