February 18, 2019 by Maura

What is a smart home universal infrared repeater

When we upgrade our smart homes, we often encounter situations like this:

A. Now I just bought the TV, not a smart TV, but still can watch, do not want to throw it away.

B. The air-conditioning in my house is good too. I Can’t change it.

C. My home electric fan is also remote control, I want to control how to do it.

These are what we call traditional home appliances. They are usually controlled by remote control, and the remote control is usually an infrared remote control. In order to make these home appliances intelligent, so that they can be controlled by voice control and remote control by a mobile phone, one-button scene control, it is necessary to use the universal infrared transmitter.

How the infrared transmitter works

It can take instructions from a smart speaker/Gateway/remote app and translate them into a language that traditional house appliances can understand.

Then it will send the instruction through an infrared transmitter to the specified device.

It’s got an infrared library of a lot of brands, so it can control a lot of devices like Smart Pai.

Therefore, if the gateway is the control center of the smart home, then the universal infrared repeater is the core of making the traditional home appliance smart.

The easiest way to tell if it’s infrared or radiofrequency is: Cover the remote with your hand and press the button, if the electrical equipment can still respond, it is the remote control for radio frequency communication, if the electronics don’t work, it’s infrared

The infrared remote controller generally has directivity, must face the direction in which the controlled equipment remote control receiver operates, and cannot have the block. The omnidirectional infrared antenna can ensure the normal control of the home equipment. The infrared transmitter is an all-directional infrared transmitter, which transmits infrared control signals in all directions. As long as there is no obvious occlusion, the control signals can reach the controlled equipment.

The following is the inside of the PCB, choose this omnidirectional type, you can get the better control

Is there a relatively complete IR code library?

If the devices don’t have relatively complete IR code library, you will have to learn the code one by one, quite troublesome, and some functions are not the code base equipment, cannot use and work properly.

Here are some tips need to know when using an intelligent remote control

1. The infrared control signal transmitted by the intelligent remote control is omnidirectional, but it may still be blocked to affect the control distance, so the IR intelligent remote control can only be used in a single room and should be placed in a relatively open and unobstructed position.

2. The infrared light signal used by the smart remote control is easily disturbed by the sunlight, so the user needs to place it somewhere without direct sunlight.

3. The intelligent remote controlled infrared LED tube is inside, the external material needs to allow the infrared light to pass through, so generally choose the deep red, purple transparent plastic material, this material looks black from the outside under the ordinary light condition, therefore, the intelligent remote control components are generally designed to be black or parts of the area that need to be transparent to the light are black, designers should take this color problem into consideration in some projects.

4. Infrared remote control is a kind of one-way control mode, which does not have the function of status feedback.

In addition to infrared-based smart Remote controls, there are smart Remote controls that use radio frequency technology, as well as products that integrate smart infrared Remote controls with radiofrequency Remote controls, such as the Ultra Remote Box 3s, Thinker, and Thinker Mini.

Compared with the infrared remote control, the radio frequency remote control has a larger transmission range, free from the interference of the sunlight, no directional characteristics, in rolling shutter doors, curtains, electric curtains, courtyard doors, and other applications more extensive than infrared.

Zwave, ZigBee, GFSK, Lora are all optimized two-way RF signals.

Wechat: maura2486