network ir blaster

Inspiration

I have some fairy lights/LED strips set up in my room. They provide dim and warm mood lighting as compared to the harsh and bright lighting from the ceiling light in my room, and I often use it as a night light. These LED strips/fairy lights come enabled with some remote control function and a IR remote, and is what I use to turn them on at night. Unfortunately, searching around for the remote when it is dark is annoying, and it would be much better to have a 'spare' remote built into my phone.

Having just taken a intro to IoT module, the obvious solution would be to send IR codes through an IR-LED connected to the internet.

What it does

Send IR codes over the network to some IR blaster, and control whatever IR-enabled device that is near the IR blaster.

How I built it

The IR blaster is hooked up to an ESP8266 board (WeMOS D1 mini). The board subscribes to a MQTT topic and blasts whatever IR code received on the MQTT channel.

A phone application publishes known IR codes to the same MQTT channel, which would be picked up the IR blaster.