WO2016117992A1

WO2016117992A1 - Wireless, smart control device for controlling infrared-controlled devices and home automation devices, using smartphones

Info

Publication number: WO2016117992A1
Application number: PCT/MX2015/000007
Authority: WO
Inventors: Brayan Gamaniel CASTRO BALDENEBRO; Omar VAZQUEZ PALMA; Dino Alejandro Pardo Guzman
Original assignee: Castro Baldenebro Brayan Gamaniel
Priority date: 2015-01-21
Filing date: 2015-01-21
Publication date: 2016-07-28

Abstract

The invention relates to a wireless, smart control device for controlling infrared-controlled devices and home automation devices, using smartphones. The device of the invention is highly effective, discrete and compact, offering Bluetooth and IR connectivity, and it is linked to an application for mobile devices, from which commands can be sent in order to transmit infrared signals to any IR remote control appliance. In addition, the IR controller device can obtain signals from any universal remote control and translate same into wireless Bluetooth signals in order to use the application.

Description

SMART WIRELESS CONTROL DEVICE FOR

CONTROL DEVICES OF INFRARED CONTROL AND DOMOTICS BY INTELLIGENT PHONES.

TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION The present invention belongs to the field of electronics and computer science since it is based on the creation of an electronic circuit that will be used to control infrared remote control devices, using a micro controller for the collection of signals from input and output response determination.

BACKGROUND

The technological revolution that the world has been experiencing during the last 50 years has impacted each of the facets of the daily life of human beings. After the marked development of electronics, since the 60s and the development of new technologies oriented to communications and applied to life, they generated a change in the majority of people living in a globalized environment, where the Connectivity plays a preponderant role and even the simplest element as a mobile device functions as a transition to the dynamics of global interconnectivity.

The transformation of traditional homes into smart homes, from the incorporation of home automation tools, transcends the limits of comfort towards efficiency and environmental sustainability. The automation of the environments was considered for many years a technological frivolity within the reach of the most privileged groups of society, but nowadays its massive appropriation is the subject of multiple investigations.

At present, the productive dynamic faces people and institutions to the challenge of efficiency, speed and ubiquity; In the modern world, any activity that cannot be carried out efficiently using remote tools represents a huge disadvantage, both competitively and in terms of quality of life. Inside this perspective, the automation of spaces and their revitalization with the incorporation of tools and technologies of information and telecommunications, is more than a frivolous whim, an imminent necessity. Tasks as simple as controlling access in environments with high security requirements becomes the vertiginous global dynamic in a problem, for those institutions and people who are not prepared.

There are many factors that can characterize the ways of life of people today, as an example, older adults living alone, population with some type of disability and living independently, even the same avatars of modernity that require everything promptly and saving time that does not even allow them to get off the vehicle.

This is how, tasks as common as opening or closing a window or a door become a problem; But with the implementation of home automation, the degree of difficulty in performing these tasks is reduced. In the current market there is a large number of very high level applications on the subject, which mostly have high costs and are designed more to generate a luxury customer experience than to facilitate the development of a specific activity to people.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF FIGURES

Figure 1 shows a schematic drawing of the general communication between the devices to be controlled, the controller device, the cell phone and the universal remote control.

Figure 2 illustrates a communications sketch of the controller device and the mobile device.

Figure 3 represents an electronic diagram of the infrared receiver module. Figure 4 illustrates the electronic diagram of the infrared emitter module. DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The vast majority of remote controls transmit a light signal in the form of pulses at 38 KHz, although there are also other carrier frequencies of 30KHz, 36KHz and 56KHz. These frequencies are usually translated into binary signals taking as reference the presence of the carrier wave as a 1, and the absence as a 0. To code this mechanism it is necessary to filter the noise to analyze the binary chain and identify the beginning and length of said chain.

The present invention includes several modules coupled to form the device, such modules are set forth below: IR emitting sensor (36), which allows the sending of infrared signals to any device that has a command receiver. In this way, if the device is in the same room as the television or the air conditioning, the module can take action on these devices either programmed or directly from the mobile phone application (35).

IR sensor infrared detector (31), which detects signals from any remote control to synchronize or change the state of the variables. With this module, the device can record the commands sent from a remote control, and reproduce them by software with a mobile phone application (35), or you can configure the devices to turn on or off with a certain button on the television's infrared remote control. .

Coupling module for power signals consisting of a solid state relay to switch power loads from low level control signals.

LED indicator that shows the status and works as a night indicator.

Bluetooth, to communicate the switch with any mobile device such as tablets or iphones.

The HC-05 bluetooth module is the one that offers a better price and feature ratio, since it is a Master-Slave module, which means that in addition to receiving connections from a PC or tablet, it is also capable of generating connections to other devices bluetooth This allows us, for example, to connect two bluetooth modules and form a point-to-point connection to transmit data between two microcontrollers or devices.

An integrated infrared detector (31) was used to filter the signal. The receiver output is then a square signal (32) that varies in its pulse widths depending on the protocol of the control brand. Thus, it is up to the multicore microcontroller (33), to carry out the beginnings of the signal and to identify, thanks to a main database stored in the same processor, the command received. After the data packet is received and decoded, the name of the command is sent via bluetooth device (34) to the application on the mobile phone (35), for example, the receiver picks up a 32-pulse code, between 1.2 ms (0 logical) and 2.4ms (1 logical), a 4 ms start pulse, when analyzing the arrangement of the bits with an Eeprom memory database, determines that this pulse train corresponds to the Volume + button of the Sony brand, so immediately send the Sony Vol + command via bluetooth signal (37), telling the phone that the Vol + key was pressed on the remote control. For the simulation of infrared signals this same device has a transmitter (36), which basically consists of a high power infrared LED (38), with an open spectrum, which is connected to one of the terminals of the multicore micro controller (33) to a 40KHz PWM signal (39) emitted by the same multicore microprocessor (33) in one of its cores. Similarly, the main module (30) receives an order from the application, for example, Sony Canal +, which indicates that it must generate the Sony protocol, the Channel + button, for this the program inside the multicore microprocessor (33) it takes both the length and the number of pulses, and the characteristics of the start pulse of a database in memory, and generates the infrared signal through the infrared LED (38).

Both the multicore microprocessor program (33) and the application program on the mobile phone (35) are designed to synchronize their databases, in order to be able to add new protocols, modify the previous ones, or even generate new ones.

It would be easy to make a loop by monitoring the RB0 pin and use a timer to measure the times involved in the ON (down) and OFF (up) pulses. The problem, as always, is that with that approach the PIC could not do otherwise. What we will do is use the INT0 interrupt (associated with changes of the RBO pin) to detect the pulses. In this way we keep the PIC free for other functions. The general appearance of a package sent by the command can be seen in Figure 5.

By default, the signal is high (inactive). The package consists of a series of ON (low) and OFF (high) pulses. Obviously after going down / up several times we will end up. Normally there is usually a longer initial ON pulse as an indication of START, but that depends on the protocol. The sequence of ON / OFF encodes the message bits. There are many possibilities (Manchester coding, pulse width coding, etc.). It is this project that we are not interested in decoding, just seeing the information on the duration of the ON and OFF pulses. With this data we would have an idea of the protocol that the command uses and we can modify the program to obtain the codes. Considering these objectives, the general idea to apply in our software is based on:

We start by activating interrupt 1NT0 in HIGH to LOW mode to detect the start of a packet. At the same time, timer 0 is reset and started to measure times. Each time we detect a change in RBO, we will save the value of the timer 0 and reset it again to measure the next pulse.

With the above we would measure the time between descent and descent. As it is interesting to discriminate between time below (ON) and above (OFF), what we will do is that every time between the INTO interruption we will change the sense of detection. In this way if we enter with a descent, we will set the detection to rise and thus we measure the time below.

The timer 0 is reset to each change. We will use the TMRO interruption as an indicator that there has been no change for a long time and therefore the pulse has ended. In that case we stop monitoring the line and simply turn over the times (converted to milliseconds) of all transitions. To overturn the times we will use the serial port. We could use the interrupt approach explained above, but as it is not critical we will use the blocking functions of the compiler in principle. Next we have the INTO interrupt code. It is declared a high priority to ensure that we do not lose anything. Initially the program starts with a status = WAIT (waiting for a package). When the start of the package is detected, we start TMRO and enable its interruption to have a time base and go to status = SCANNING. If we are in SCANNING mode, we simply save the time elapsed since we were last here and increase a variable that takes the number of transitions into account. In both cases the timer is set to 0 and the direction of the change detection is reversed.

Now comes the TMRO interrupt code, declared as low priority. Since every time we detect a change TMR0L = 0 is made, the interruption does not enter as long as there is activity on the line. Once the line is OFF, there are no changes and nobody takes care to reset the counter, so it will end up overflowing and the interruption will be caused.

In the interruption the first thing that is done is to return to the status of waiting for the start of the package (status = WAIT, stop TMRO and wait for a HIGH2LOW change). Next, it is verified that the number of transitions is not very low (to avoid "false positives" due to some spurious transition in the line). All protocols will have a minimum of 12-16 transitions. If there is a sufficient number of transitions, the INTO interrupt is deactivated (that is, we stop monitoring the line) and we dump the data through the serial port. To avoid including a complex code within the interruption (which is not advisable) what is done is to set the ir_detected flag to 1. In the main program we will detect this flag and dump the results.

The next function dumps the results we save (the pulse timings). As obviously the line starts from OFF and returns to OFF we will have an odd number of pulses, starting with a start (ON) pulse and then a sequence of pairs (OFF / ON). We use printf to dump the results to the standard output (serial port).

The only thing that is most cryptic is the conversion of times to microseconds. Saved times (uint8's) are in units of clock ticks. With the configuration chosen for the TIMERO, each step of the counter corresponds to 51.2 microseconds. An approach with Whole and avoids dividing arithmetic is multiplying by 205 and dividing by 4 (»2) which corresponds to 205/4 = 51.25, close enough for the current application. Obviously this conversion will be dependent on the parameters chosen when configuring TMRO.

The main program opens the serial port [115200 bauds) and configures TMRO (without starting it). The interruption INT0 (which is always a high priority) and the interruption of the TMRO (low priority) are enabled.

The most delicate part is choosing the parameters of the Timerl. We have chosen to use 8-bit mode because it is sufficient for the times involved and we save handling 16-bit counters. A divisor of 1: 256 has been chosen which corresponds to 256x0.2 = 51 usec. This will be the maximum resolution of the timing found (since they are measured in multiples of 51 usec). It is suitable because typically the smallest pulses on the remote controls are of the order of 400-600 usec, so they enter the order of at least 10 steps.

The immediate consequence of this choice is that the overflow due to lack of activity will occur after 256 x 51 = 12.5 msec. This determines that the longest detectable pulses will be 12 msec. If a pulse (ON / OFF) lasts more than 12 msec the program will consider that there will be no more activity and will declare (erroneously) an end of package.

After enabling the interruptions, they are responsible for the bulk of the work. The main program simply enters a loop where the ir_detected flag is monitored. If set to 1 it is a sign that we have detected a packet and call the function that dumps the information through the port. After finishing the results, we enable the line monitoring again.

Two dumps of the serial port are attached when you press a couple of keys of a SONY command, the results are shown in the table in figure 6. We see that we always start with a long START (2400 usec) and then there is a series of OFF / ON. The OFF part is always constant (512 usec) but the ON part ranges between 615 and 1230 usec. Clearly the 0/1 are encoded in this duration. In fact the protocol used by SONY sets a START bit of 2400 usec, OFF pulses of 600 usec and ON pulses of 600 (0) or 1200 (1) as seen in Figure 7.

Claims

CLAIMS that are claimed are:

1. A device and a demotic control method for electronic remote control devices by means of discrete and compact infrared light, which is linked to an application designed for mobile devices with android and / or IOS platform and which is constituted by the following elements:

a) A multicore micro controller programmed in one of its cores with high-level Spin language for communication and link functions, in the same way another of its cores in low-level language [assembler] is used to perform the measurement operations of pulses and frequencies

b) A Bluetooth Emitter-Receiver that is used to establish two-way serial communication at 1 Mbps between the micro controller of claim la and the mobile application described in claim le, by means of which commands or orders and information about Infrared protocols and on or off times.

c) An infrared receiver module capable of carrying out the demodulation process of the infrared signal, delivering a digital signal ready to enter the multicore micro controller described in claim la.

d) An infrared transmitter module consisting of an array of H-shaped transistors that functions as a signal amplifier with 2 inputs, a PWM at 40

Khz, and a pulse train with the protocol information to be sent, excites an infrared open-angle LED that manipulates compatible devices.

e) An application designed in a light and easy way to install on any mobile device, with interactive menus modifiable by the user, where you can establish the real image of the device you want to control, as well as a canvas of the house-room where you They find the devices.