If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you will have noticed that I recently went on a Raspberry-Pi-fueled, hardware hacking binge, first using it as an infrared remote control and then applying the same principles to make it into a RF remote control, thus mostly controlling my entire house in this fashion.
This is the IR setup in action:
The RF transmitter/receiver pairAfter my wildly successful post How to turn your Raspberry Pi into an infrared remote control, which was mainly a list of various resources and instructions on how to record and replay infrared signals with the Raspberry Pi, I am writing the second instalment, on controlling RF devices with it.
I’ve long wanted to control my garage door from the internet (because apparently I love making useless enhancements to things that run on electricity), but I couldn’t figure out the codes it sends. Even though I could, in theory, use the Raspberry Pi as a poor man’s RF transmitter (hint: don’t do this because of the noise, and it doesn’t work anyway because of kernel timings), I didn’t know what to transmit with it, and I couldn’t find the protocols anywhere online.
To help in this herculean task, I bought an RF transmitter/receiver pair (pictured on the right) from eBay for around 1 euro (with shipping), which can decode received signals (and send them again).
A few months ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi, and it’s been the best recent purchase I made, by far. Not so much because I have that many things to do with it, but because it features a few GPIO pins, which you can control with software and make output ones and zeroes (basically high and low voltage).
This has opened a whole new world to me, as, before this, software and hardware were completely sep
Greek. Amateur F1 driver. Technology enthusiast. Single parent. Liar.
Founder of Stochastic Technologies, a software development agency, and creator of various products which you can find in the résumé.
