My first project

So basically I'm a nerd with a whole bunch of undeveloped interests, electronics, programming, digital art, photography, astronomy, bull riding and moon walking. Well maybe not the last two. What I need is a project that will motivate me to actually start learning the deeper parts of some of these interests.

To that end I have come up with an idea hat will allow me to at least cover some of the electronicy parts.


My flat has a Daikin heat pump, and for no reason at all I thought it would be cool to build a web based remote control for it so that I can control it via a web page on my phone and also get some basic info about the room, temp, light levels and random things like that. It will be a micro controller hooked up to a router and communicates with the heat pump via IR.

The first thing I'm going to have to do is figure out how to build and IR receiver so that I can begin to reverse engineer the IR protocol that the remote uses. I'm assuming that it uses a 38khz carrier wave with manchester encoding as every other website about IR signal decoding says this is what they use. I hope the assumption is correct as I've ordered that parts accordingly.

I will be prototyping everything on the Arduino as it's easy to use and I can be very lazy as a lot of other people have been very hard at work writing libs and schematics for me to leech off of. Eventually I want to run it all using a PIC but all in good time. Hopefully more pictures to come.

Things I need to learn/do:

• Learn to decode IR
• Map Daikin remote protocol
• Learn how to make an IR transmitter
• Transmit working IR codes
• Learn how to connect an Arduino to the intertubes
• Learn php or java or whatever and make a website for the arduino to connect to
• Learn how to optimise a website for cell phones

Piece of cake right?