Midterm Report
Project:Web Based Home Entertainment Center Remote
Group Eight:Josh McJilton
Jose Guzman
Edgar Ortiz
Report Date:March 27, 2001
Abstract
The Web Based Home Entertainment Center Remote (WeBHECR) will consist of two main hardware components and a software package that will run on a user’s home personal computer (PC). The two hardware devices are the Home Control Device (HCD) and the Home Remote Device (HRD). The HCD will connect directly to the user’s home PC via the serial port. The HRD will be mounted inconspicuously on the user’s ceiling, out of the way and with a clear line-of-sight to the devices it will control. The HRD will be using IR transmissions to deliver the proper device and function codes in order to initiate an action. It will receive the proper device codes that will need to be sent from the HCD using radio frequency (RF) transmissions.
The software package running on the user’s home PC will consist of a web server, an IR device code database, and special software to communicate with the HCD on the serial port. The code database will store all the necessary IR codes that the HCD will require in order to transmit to the HRD and subsequently control the home entertainment center devices. The web server will be responsible for serving the web application that will allow user’s to log in to WeBHECR and initiate all of these actions and be able to remotely control their home devices.
Project Background
The evolution of our project has gone through several phases in order to reach our current status and outlook. Our original idea was to take any device and transform it into a network device that could be controlled via the internet. We decided that turning a VCR into that network device would be the most interesting and would serve a useful purpose in that users could control their VCR when they are away from their house.
However, after failing to gather useful information from manufacturers concerning the control logic of a VCR, we were forced to start changing our initial idea. In addition, we sought after an idea that wouldn't necessarily require working with the internals of any electronic device. At this point we decided that making use of the built-in infrared interface would provide a better route for implementing our idea. In essence, we would be building our own remote control to operate our VCR and make the remote our network device.
At this point we realized that we could now expand the scope of our project. We could now implement a remote that could operate on any device that can be controlled by infrared signals. This became our proposed idea where we would build two hardware devices in order to properly relay a signal from our PC to our home entertainment device.
Individual Achievements
Josh McJilton
Josh has split time between several aspects of the project. After Jose had some success constructing an Infrared Receiver circuit Josh, Jose, and Edgar built and IR Transmitter circuit that is able to control Home Entertainment Devices. Josh also made progress with the Web application software. Using the Apache Project's Jakarta-Tomcat as the application server, we are now able to create and serve dynamic Web pages that access information in a database. Using Tomcat for our Web server will allow us to leverage the Java API for serial communications. This should simplify the software necessary to send codes from the database to our hardware.
Jose Guzman
Jose was mainly involved with working with the infrared aspect of our project. He spent time researching different kinds of device code protocols that are used in sending infrared signals, sources of specific device codes, infrared transmitter and receiver circuits, and data for different components of the circuits. As a result, he was able to build an IR receiver circuit that we used to study remote control signals. He also helped Josh build the IR transmitting circuit that will be used as part of our Home Remote Device. Finally, he was able to work with Edgar to add parts to the transmitting circuit in order to control a VCR with a remote control via the IR transmitting circuit.
Edgar Ortiz
Edgar has mainly been involved in researching for the serial communication part of the project. He and Josh have been looking at the several possibilities on how to implement the server application and link it to the serial port. They have decided that we will probably use Java, since it has adequate API support for serial communication. He helped Jose with the transmitting circuit and has mostly been supporting the group to get the IR circuit working.
Modifications
In working towards the completion of our project, we have had to make some modifications to our original proposal. To this point, the largest modification we made was determining that an FPGA was not required in order to implement our Home Remote Device. We have decided that we can take our signal from our RF receiver and run it directly to our IR transmitter.
Second, we are changing our plan of attack in order to cover more important aspects of our project. We are planning on excluding the RF transmission aspect of our project for the moment. In this sense the signal coming from the serial port of our home PC will go directly to the IR transmitter. Once we have been successful in sending the signal from start to finish, we will go back and place the RF transmission between the serial port and IR transmitter. We have had an excessive amount of difficulty completing this aspect of our project and feel that this is the most expendable part of the project. This way we can still produce a final product in the event that we never reach success with RF transmission.
Conclusion
Our first priority in completing this project is making sure that we can send a signal from our serial port and produce a proper TTL signal that a home entertainment device would be able to recognize through its infrared interface. Once we can get to this point, we can further access our problems in using the RF receiver and transmitter boards along with their decoder and encoder chips. At this point we feel strongly that the boards are operating properly, but we cannot say the same for the chips. Waiting for the arrival of our two chips and the excessive difficulty working with the RF boards have played a large part in having to move our schedule around.
References
PC Serial Interface
Chapter 12 Xilinx Tutorial
Control-S (a.k.a. SIRCS)-unidirectional protocol found on VCRs and DVDs
S-Link
SIRCS - Serial Infrared Remote Control System
Definitions
IR transmission circuits
IR signals
Control-S protocol (Sony Protocol)
RF transmission circuits
Serial Infrared Remote Controller
IR codes for CD player
Device Codes