"Lamp on." *click* "Lamp has been turned on." *commence feeling powerful*

I started this project a couple of months ago with the simple hopes of controlling an outlet. Flashing an LED is great, but when you need to make something more substantial happen, this is the thing to do. I was almost tempted to get relays like this one. I decided against that because of this excellent tutorial called "Arduino Controlled Relay Box."

After I priced it all out at Lowe's and Sparkfun, I found that each box would cost around $30. These boxes are large, don't forget, and require a wired connection to the Arduino. To control five outlets would cost $150 in components plus low-voltage wire to run around the house to each outlet. I'm not sure my family is going to be ok with bundles of wires running down the hall.

Time for a better solution. I scrounged around the vast caverns of Amazon to find what I thought would be the best fit for my plans. Etekcity 5LX remote outlets are just the ticket. They cost a whopping $35 and offer control of 5 outlets and negate the need to run wires. Not bad.

I bought the set of 5 outlets and two remotes, but you can also order almost any combination by viewing the related products on the page.

My first plan was to hack the remote apart and add transistors to the buttons. This began one of the larges failures in my hacking career: I fried both remotes! Ah! I wound up ordering a new remote and trying a much safer method. This new method was to sniff the RF codes of the remote and retransmit them using the Arduino. Of course, this meant another stop at Sparkfun for their beautifully simple RF products: RF Receiver, RF Transmitter. Both of these <$5 components proved to be quite valuable.

Once again digging up some help online, I came across the an exquisite library made for just such a thing as what I was doing. It's called the RCSwitch Arduino library.

After downloading and installing the library, open up the advanced receive sketch and follow the link in the commenting to see the tutorial. Really, you can operate it without much guidance. The code is simple, and it literally spits out codes on screen as you press buttons on the remote. I found that on my remote the decimal value was the easiest to work with. It will spit out a code that looks something like this: Decimal: 5592371 (24Bit) Binary: 010101010101010100110011 Tri-State: FFFFFFFF0101 PulseLength: 185 microseconds Protocol: 1
Raw data: 5816,220,544,592,152,224,536,596,156,220,540,588,160,220,540,592,172,204,540,596,160,212,544,592,164,208,544,592,
164,212,548,588,164,208,544,216,544,588,168,208,548,208,544,208,544,208,548,208,548,

For the practical purposes of this project, you only care about the part that says, "Decimal: 5592371" You should press each button on the remote in an order that you will remember and then copy all the data from the serial monitor into something else (Notepad, or Notepad ++ would be great). Save it.

Next, open the transmit sketch and begin testing. I decided to make the repeat value 9 (I discovered that is what the remote itself sends) and I changed the decimal code to the one for "ON" on my first outlet. I uploaded the sketch and watched it work! Success is great! I then modified the code to do all 10 buttons on my remote. I added the switch/case statement to shorten it a bit. If you are wondering why I went with a serial interface, it is so that I can more easily interact with Processing in the next section of this tutorial....