Controlling the colour of an LED using an IR remote.

All of us generally have TV remotes lying around us with a lot of unused and unprogrammed keys on them. This project explores using these IR remote and a receiver for wireless communication. IR remotes are economic over modern modes of wireless communication such as bluetooth and wifi.

Here I am using a Dish tv set top box remote to control and customise the colour of a LED wirelessly. The colour (red, green or blue) is chosen using the coloured buttons on the remote and the intensity of the selected colour is varied using the volume and channel keys on the remote. The data of intensities of the three colours and the key pressed can also be sent to a computer over USB.



The LED could be replaced with a relay to control the lights and fans in the room. Doing the same using bluetooth will need you to launch an app, connect to the system and then control the switches. But with a TV remote, sending a signal to the arduino should not be a problem at all (specially if you are a television addict). So, we could have the useless "Theater mode" key on the  remote to actually switch off the lights and turn on your 5.1 audio system.