Control Your TV with Your Phone

Step 6 Next Steps

Once your Web Clicker is up and running, you'll probably want to tweak it / play with it!  Here are a few ideas to get you started;

Local File Storage
The Propeller Platform USB has a microSD / microSDHC card slot so you can add up to 32GB of local file storage.  You could serve MP3's, pictures or whatever else.  You could also use the SD card for data logging.  To start playing with the SD card, grab the fsrw object.

Multiple IR transmissions with a single command
Take a look at the source code - towards the top, there's a section of 'Elseif', which tell the Web Clicker what to do when a command request is received.  You can make the device do anything in response to a command, including sending several IR blasts.

Controlling a motor, switch, light, or anything else
Why not use the Web Clicker to turn on a motor, change a light, play back a wav file or something else?  It's the same process as adding multiple IR transmissions - look at the code with the Elseif commands - instead of playcommand(x), change it to your newly created method.

That's it!  I had a lot of fun putting the Web Clicker together - let me know if you've got any questions or comments!

Comments

[oakleym82]

This is the perfect instructable, thanks! This will be my first one. My company recently installed two pan/tilt/zoom cameras in our conference room (that are IR controlled only), as well as an IR controlled video input selector. We want to allow our remote employees to select which camera to view and remotely pan/tilt/zoom them. I'm looking forward to putting this together.

One question: Do I have to have the SD card? e.g. when I program the device does it go into volatile storage, requiring it to be reprogrammed every time power is lost, or is there some on-board flash?

[Gadget Gangster]

The current program doesn't store the code on any non-volatile memory, but you could store it on the Propeller Platform USB's EEPROM, which is built-in, or use an SD card.

[oakleym82]

I've been pouring over this for a while and being new to Spin, I can't figure out how to get the LONGs to go to a file or something that I can use to reload the codes when it reboots. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Also, I am having the problem where it crashes after recording 5 codes, or sometimes on playback.

One more thing, any advice on how I could rework it so that I can mimic holding a button like Vol+ instead of clicking it a bunch of times to raise the volume a lot?

[holdenba]

We need to control the selections of different videos to be shown in one projector via our iPhone/SmartPhone and and internet or 3G connection. Can your device do this?

[Gadget Gangster]

Maybe, it depends on how videos are queued -

If there's an Infrared command that switches videos, then certainly. If there's a computer that controls the currently playing video file, the Propeller Platform USB can interface with it over the USB connection - but it's beyond the scope of this instructable.

Hope it helps!

[holdenba]

The DVD players have a remote. I thought that maybe that would work.

[Gadget Gangster]

Yep, it should, as long as they're IR remotes.