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Added lirc (remote control) support

A project log for Network Amplifier

Network enabled amplifier that consolidates many audio routing needs

ronaldronald 04/24/2015 at 08:060 Comments

I've recently added lirc support so that I can use my TV remote to also control the amplifier.

Input switching, volume, mute, changing radio station presets, mpd (mp3 player) controls and tone controls (bass / treble) are all possible now from the remote control in addition to the network commands already there.

The inspiration for this feature was that it still took far too much time to perform an action if my mobile / tablet wasn't already nearby, on, browsed to the correct web address etc.

After all, a very strong goal for this project from the beginning was to be able to hit the 'mute' button quickly when TV ads came on :) Even though the TV remote naturally has a mute button, it doesn't mute audio coming out of it's main audio output sockets, only that of the internal speakers (annoying I know).

Selecting unused buttons on the remote was fairly easy as this particular model includes a section to optionally control a DVD or VCR (which is ignored by the TV) so I just mapped those buttons for the above mentioned features. I did however map the original mute button as it doesn't make a difference for the TV (as the volume is always zero) and the advantage of this was that a small mute symbol appears on the TV (if it's switched on of course).

The lirc hardware interface is a USB-UIRT but you can use whatever works as this is certainly overkill but I already had bought the UIRT for this project on day one.

All the updated source code is on Github, which can be found under this project's links section.

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