CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Instructions Test and Investigate Appliance Remote Plug the appliance remote control receiver into a handy power outlet and then plug an appliance (a small lamp is ideal when testing) into the socket on the receiver. Test that the unit works correctly in factory form by using the remote control to turn the appliance on and off. There’s no point doing a lot of work modifying something if it doesn’t work as intended in the first place! Also pay attention to how long you need to hold the button down for the transmitter to operate correctly. Some systems require you to hold the button for half a second or so, and others will operate if you stab at it very briefly. You may find you need to adjust the button press time variable in the example programs that follow if your remote control has unusual characteristics. Some remotes also perform different functions depending on whether you hold the button down or not, such as toggling a lamp on a brief press or fading it up/down on a long press. The photo in Figure 2-3 shows two different appliance remote control sets. The set on the left is designed for Australian power sockets running at 240V and has four sets of on/off buttons, and can switch between four different ranges to control a total of 16 devices from one remote control. The receiver unit has a visual indication of status and is designed to be plugged into a wall socket, then an appliance plugged into it. It also supports a ground connection so it’s suitable for many types of appliances. Figure 2-3. Appliance remote controls The set on the right is designed for U.S. power sockets running at 110V, and has a much smaller transmitter, but it can only turn one appliance on or off. This particular model doesn’t have a ground 19 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL connection, so it’s suitable only for double-insulated appliances that don’t require a ground pin, such as most lamps. There are many other types of appliance remote controls available and you can often pick up sets containing one remote control and three receivers for $30 to $50. Once you’ve tested your remote control on an appliance such as a desk lamp, take the battery out of the transmitter module and open it up by either removing the screws or (if it clips together) forcing the shell apart with a screwdriver to gain access to the circuit inside. You will probably find everything on a single PCB with a wire antenna connected at one end and the battery clip connected at the other. The buttons on the front of the remote control are usually just plastic or rubber covers that mount over the top of the actual buttons mounted on the circuit board, so locate the relevant “appliance on” and “appliance off” buttons on the circuit board and then turn it over to find the soldered connections to the back of the buttons. Figure 2-4 shows the location of the solder pads on the back of the buttons for a typical remote control. Figure 2-4. PCB of appliance remote control transmitter If each button has only two connections as in the particular remote control shown in Figure 2-4, you’re on easy street, but many PCB-mount buttons have four pins to provide them with a strong mechanical mount even though they only have two actual connections so it’s not always obvious which ones you need to use. The four pins are usually arranged in two pairs that are joined together internally so that when the button is pressed the pairs are shorted together. What you need to do is find a pair of pins that are normally open but then short together when the button is pressed. 20 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL There are several ways of doing this: you could use a multimeter to measure the resistance between pairs of pins and see if it changes from very high to very low when the button is pressed, or you could even just put the battery back in the transmitter and then touch a short piece of wire across a pair of pins and see what happens. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong because the matching pins are joined together inside the switch anyway. If you get it right, the remote control will act as if you pressed the button and send a signal to the receiver and turn your test appliance on or off depending on which button you shorted out. Every four-pin pushbutton we have ever seen joins connections together internally along two opposite sides, so if you pick two diagonally opposite pins it will almost certainly work no matter what the orientation of the button may be. Once you’ve found an operational pair of pins behind each button, use a felt-tip marker to put a dot next to each one to make things easier for yourself when it comes time to connect to the Arduino. Assemble Reed Relay Shield To link your Arduino to the appliance remote control you need to make sure the two devices are electrically isolated. The simplest way to do this is with one 5V reed relay for each button you want to control. A reed relay is a very low-power electromechanical switch that allows a low current to control a higher current. Modern 5V reed relays require only about 20mA to operate. That’s low enough that you can drive it directly from an Arduino output without requiring any other buffer circuitry at all, so the next step is to mount some reed relays on a prototyping shield and connect them to Arduino outputs. A regular Arduino prototyping shield will comfortably fit four reed relays plus connectors. If you only want to operate a single device, you probably only need two relays (one to connect to the “on” button, one for “off”) but it can be handy having more outputs so I installed four. Start by fitting the relays and male PCB-mount headers to the shield as shown in Figure 2-5. Figure 2-5. Reed relays and male headers fitted to PCB 21 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL The reed relays have their inputs (coil connections) on the bottom center pair of pins when aligned with the notch to the left, as in Figure 2-5, and their outputs on the outer pairs of pins. Turn the shield over and solder the relays and connectors in place. You only need to solder the pins that will actually be used, but you can solder all the pins if you prefer (see Figure 2-6). Figure 2-6. Reed relay connections soldered to shield The particular prototyping shield shown in Figure 2-6 has a strip of ground connections down one side and +5V down the other. Use some short lengths of wire to join a coil connection from each relay together and then to ground. Also connect the PCB-mount plug pins to the adjacent outer connections (outputs) on the reed relays and fit the breakaway headers that allow the shield to plug into an Arduino. You’ll notice in the photo shown in Figure 2-7 that we only fitted three of the four breakaway headers. This may seem odd, but we didn’t need to make a connection to any of the analog input pins so there’s no need to put that connector on the board. The shield will still mount very firmly with three connectors and having the fourth connector installed would just make it a little bit harder to align and insert into an Arduino for no benefit. Turn the board back over and install jumper leads from the other coil connection on each relay to the matching Arduino digital output. In this project we started with digital output 5 for the first relay, 6 for the second, and so on (see Figure 2-8). 22 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Figure 2-7. Connections to +5V and ground Figure 2-8. Connections from digital outputs to relay inputs 23 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Electro-mechanical relays operate by running current through a coil to generate a magnetic field and pull output contacts together, thus completing a circuit. When power to the relay is turned off, the magnetic field collapses and the contacts release, but while it is collapsing the field generates a “reverse spike” or “back-EMF”—a brief high voltage of opposite polarity to the original voltage. What this means is that the Arduino output that was previously supplying +5V to hold the relay on is temporarily subjected to a big blast of negative voltage, and if the spike is big enough the output can actually be damaged or destroyed. The simple solution is to fit a “reverse biased” diode across the relay coil so that as soon as the reverse spike begins it will be shorted out by the diode and the Arduino output will be protected. Diodes only pass current in one direction, so by fitting it backward across the relay, it won’t do anything in normal operation and will appear as an open circuit, but will easily conduct the reverse-voltage spike while the relay’s magnetic field collapses. This will protect your Arduino from the reverse voltage. Given the extremely low power involved in a small reed relay it’s highly unlikely that it will blow an I/O pin right away, so it can be tempting to leave off the protection diode and hope everything will be all right. However, damage to I/O pins can be subtle and cumulative and putting a diode in now is much cheaper than replacing an Arduino later so it’s better to play it safe.Because the voltages and currents involved are very small, you can use just about any power diode or signal diode you may have available. We used 1N4004 diodes, which are commonly available for only a few cents each—we buy them by the hundred so that we always have plenty around when we need them. Fit a diode across each relay coil with the “anode” lead going to the pin connected to ground, and the “cathode” lead (the end with the stripe) going to the relay pin connected to the Arduino output as shown in Figure 2-9. Figure 2-9. Protection diodes connected across relay coils That’s the shield all done, so next you need to assemble a couple of small wiring harnesses. 24 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Figure 2-10. Connections to link shield with remote control Separate pairs of wires from the ribbon cable by nipping between the ends and pulling it apart with your fingers, then solder one end of each pair of wires to a female line connector and assemble the connector to make a wiring harness that you can plug into the shield as shown in Figure 2-10. You now have a useful general-purpose relay shield that you can connect to any low-voltage device that you want to control simply by soldering the ends of the wiring harnesses into place. Connect Reed Relay Shield to Remote Control Solder the pair of wires from each wiring harness across the back of the buttons in the remote control using the connections you marked on the PCB earlier, as shown in Figure 2-11. Mount the reed relay shield on your Arduino and plug each wiring harness into the connectors on the reed relay shield, as shown in Figure 2-12. If your appliance remote control runs on 3V you can optionally remove the battery from the remote control and solder a pair of wires across the (+) and (–) battery terminals, then connect them to +3.3V and GND, respectively, on your Arduino. The remote control will then draw its power from the Arduino and you never need to worry about its battery going flat. In our case, though, the remote control uses a little “A23” type 12V battery so we left it in place in the transmitter. Now all the hardware is done, so on to the software! 25 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Figure 2-11. Remote control transmitter with connections in place Figure 2-12. Remote control linked to shield 26 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL Create Reed Relay Control Program When you use the appliance remote control manually you only press the buttons momentarily and don’t hold them down indefinitely, so to simulate a button press we’ll pulse a reed relay on for 250ms (1/4 of a second) and then turn it off again. That should be plenty of time for the appliance remote to detect the virtual “button press” and then send the appropriate signal to the receiver. There are two versions of the code available for download from the Practical Arduino web site. The first version, called ApplianceRemoteControl, is designed to be as conceptually simple as possible to make it easy for a beginner to follow what it does. The second version, called ApplianceRemoteControlCompact, is functionally identical but uses some more advanced concepts to make the code smaller. The second version is harder for a beginner to understand, but comparing the two programs is a great way to see how more advanced concepts (such as arrays) can make your code much smaller. Since the Arduino has very limited memory capacity it is important to know how to minimize your code size. When you compile (“Verify”) a program in the Arduino IDE, the size of the resulting program is shown in bytes in the bottom left of the window. It’s good to get into the habit of looking at the size of the programs you create to get a feel for how much memory your software will take up. With larger programs it can become quite a juggling act to squeeze all the features you want into the few kilobytes of available space. We’ll start by working through the longer, but conceptually simpler, ApplianceRemoteControl program. ApplianceRemoteControl The code starts by defining some basic values such as which digital I/O lines need to be used as outputs and how long to hold each “button press” on for. // Use pins 5 through 12 as the digital outputs int output1 = 5; int output2 = 6; int output3 = 7; int output4 = 8; int output5 = 9; int output6 = 10; int output7 = 11; int output8 = 12; int buttonPressTime = 250; // Number of milliseconds to hold outputs on You’ll notice that it defines eight outputs, not just the two or four we use in this project. The extra outputs don’t matter if we don’t use them, but by defining them now you can plug in a shield with up to eight relays or even an eight-way opto-isolator later on and use exactly the same program with no modification required. This would come in very handy if you want to connect up all eight on/off buttons on an eight-way appliance remote control. However, keep in mind that the ATMega CPU in an Arduino can only supply a limited amount of current from each pin and that the total output current is also limited. If you try turning on eight reed relays at once on eight outputs you’d probably exceed the chip’s current supply rating. With the example programs shown here it’s not a problem because they only ever allow one output to be turned on at a time, but if you use different code to turn outputs on and off independently you need to be careful of the total current draw. 27 CHAPTER 2  APPLIANCE REMOTE CONTROL The program then runs the setup function that tells the CPU to switch each of those digital pins into output mode, then forces them to an initial low state so all the relays are turned off when the program starts running. It also opens the serial port (USB on a Duemilanove) for communication with the host computer at a speed of 38400bps. void setup() { // Open the serial connection to listen for commands from the host Serial.begin(38400); // Set up the pins as outputs pinMode(output1, OUTPUT); pinMode(output2, OUTPUT); pinMode(output3, OUTPUT); pinMode(output4, OUTPUT); pinMode(output5, OUTPUT); pinMode(output6, OUTPUT); pinMode(output7, OUTPUT); pinMode(output8, OUTPUT); // Make sure the outputs are all set LOW initally digitalWrite(output1, LOW); digitalWrite(output2, LOW); digitalWrite(output3, LOW); digitalWrite(output4, LOW); digitalWrite(output5, LOW); digitalWrite(output6, LOW); digitalWrite(output7, LOW); digitalWrite(output8, LOW); } The program then enters the main loop, which is where the real action happens. The main loop watches the serial port for data being sent to it and examines any characters to see if they match the ID of a known output. If there is a match it pushes that output high to turn on the relay connected to it, waits 250ms, and then takes it low again to turn off the relay before going back to the start of the loop to listen for the next command. The outputs are labelled “1” through “8,” corresponding to the eight output pins defined previously. void loop() { byte val; // Check if a value has been sent by the host if(Serial.available()) { val = Serial.read(); if(val == '1') { // Pulse the 1st button Serial.println("Output 1 ON"); digitalWrite(output1, HIGH); delay(buttonPressTime); digitalWrite(output1, LOW); Serial.println("Output 1 OFF"); 28 . available for download from the Practical Arduino web site. The first version, called ApplianceRemoteControl, is designed to be as conceptually simple as possible to make it easy for a beginner. an Arduino output without requiring any other buffer circuitry at all, so the next step is to mount some reed relays on a prototyping shield and connect them to Arduino outputs. A regular Arduino. to align and insert into an Arduino for no benefit. Turn the board back over and install jumper leads from the other coil connection on each relay to the matching Arduino digital output. In