Building an all-in-one remote with the Uno

An electronic engineering student with the handle “Victor8o5” has designed an all-in-one remote control using a number of basic hardware components, including an Atmel-based Arduino Uno (Atmel ATmega328 MCU), LCD keypad shield, infrared LED and infrared sensor.

Victor8o5 kicked off his AiO project by gathering the codes of the various remotes around the house using the infrared sensor.

“Once the code has been uploaded and the sensor connected we go to ‘Tools’ and we click on ‘Serial Monitor’ [in the sketch]. You will see a message that says ‘Ready to decode IR!’ now, by pressing any key of the remote while facing the sensor, we will be able to obtain the code,” he explained in a recent Instructables post.

“Once you’ve finished with the code it should be able to work, make sure you place the infrared LED from digital pin 3 to ground, pin 3 is a PWM pin, other pins won’t work. Left and right buttons control the menus, up and down control the submenus, select sends the code attached to the corresponding submenu inside the menu.”

As Victor8o5 notes, several LEDs and a transistor can be used to boost power and range.

“This is because the power supplied by a digital pin is limited to 40mA, enough to light one or two LED’s but not enough to light an array of 5 LED’s for example,” he added.

“The resistor value for the base (middle pin of the transistor) should be around 1-2k. Due the high frequency switching a resistor may not be needed since the LED’s will handle the power. I’ve tried this myself with a standard IR LED and a 5V supply from the digital pin 3 with no problems.”

Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s Instructables page here.