mdoff's blog

MQTT IR universal remote

· Tomasz Lewiński

IR remotes are great. You don’t have to get up from the couch to switch channel, they are cheap or you can always buy some universal ones. But they also have some downsides, you have to see the reciever, they are restricted by range, and somtimes you just can’t find that thing ;)

I had some ESP8266 laying around so why not use it to replace my old remotes?

First I used arduino, IR reciever and IRrecvDumpV2 to decode my radio and TV remote signals. Then, after some research, turns out, that there is no lua library for sending IR codes. I didn’t want build one by myself, so I decided to use Arduino IDE with IRremoteESP8266 and Arduino MQTT libraries. Parts list:

  • ESP8266
  • AMS1117 3.3V (voltage regulator)
  • IR emitting diode (from broken remote)
  • some wires and goldpins
  • universal dotted PCB

IR remote schema IR remote picture 1 IR remote picture 2 Like you see, the circuit it’s just ESP8266 connected to diode (with voltage regulator).

I hava a MQTT Mosquitto broker setup on my home server, so controlling is super easy. You can find code here.

Update 2016-10-13

I’ve added 4.7kΩ resistor between IR diode and ESP8266 to protect the board.