USB remote control receiver for PowerDVD

Monday, 7th June 2010

I enjoy watching films and mainly do so sitting at my desktop PC. This has taught me that cheap office chairs are not the most comfortable things to sit on for extended periods of time, especially when the next room contains a comfortable bean bag and a good place to stick a screen. A gap between the two rooms allows me to pass cables from one to the other, and after purchasing a 10m DVI-D cable and a USB extension lead on eBay I had both picture and sound sorted out (I use a USB sound "card"). This left me with one final problem: how to control the PC through a wall.

One possibility would be to extend the lead on my keyboard, but its media buttons light up (bothersome in a darkened room) and some of the keyboard shortcuts in PowerDVD (such as Ctrl+P for the popup menu when watching Blu-ray discs) are tricky to hit in the dark. Given my fondness for infra-red remote controls building a remote control receiver would seem like both an interesting and useful way to spend a weekend.

Rather than build something that relied on some Windows software to translate received remote control signals into keystrokes I decided to use the free V-USB library to construct something that showed up in Windows as a standard USB keyboard. One of the sample V-USB projects is a USB keyboard, which made getting started much easier! The above photograph shows the initial prototype, based around an ATmega168. The tall three-legged component sticking up out of the board is a TSOP2438, which is an infra-red receiver and demodulator. This is tuned to the 38kHz carrier employed by most remote controls and outputs a logic low or logic high depending on the presence or absence of such a signal. The ATmega168 is programmed to time the incoming signal and passes this timing information to a collection of routines that attempt to decode it. I have currently two decoders, one for the NEC protocol and another for SIRCS — information about some common protocols can be found on this website.

The choice of these two protocols is down to the remote controls I have around me. The one that offered me the most useful buttons was the PlayStation 2 DVD remote control (SIRCS), though this is missing some useful controls, such as volume and the red, green, yellow and blue buttons. To remedy this I went and bought a cheap universal remote control from Clas Ohlson. After hunting through several of the modes I settled on the Clas Ohlson DVD one (0815) as most of the buttons work in this mode (the only unshifted one that doesn't is the record button, and I can live without it). In this mode the remote control uses the NEC protocol.

To turn the receiver into something more conveniently sized I decided to switch from the 28-pin ATmega168 to the 14-pin ATtiny84, shown in the above photograph. The compiled program was already small enough to fit into the reduced memory, and the only modification I had to make was to amend two timing routines to share the same timer peripheral as the ATtiny84 only has two timers, not the three I'd been using on the ATmega168.

I also opted to add a switch to the design. One problem with supporting both Blu-ray and DVD is that the way you navigate menus is quite different between the two; Blu-ray discs use a simple popup menu (Ctrl+P) which appears on top of the film, whereas DVDs seem to offer a number of different menu commands — the two most common ones being "Title menu" (no shortcut) and "Root menu" (J). PowerDVD also lets you choose from a list of DVD menus in a context menu with one shortcut (L). I set the button on the receiver to switch between "Blu-ray" and "DVD" modes; in Blu-ray mode, the menu button sends Ctrl+P and in DVD mode the menu button sends L.

I bought an enclosure that is, in retrospect, a little too small. The above photograph shows the receiver assembled on stripboard with a fairly cramped layout. Fortunately there was sufficient room to include pin headers on the board, which will allow me to plug in a programmer to modify the software should I need to in the future. The LED on the front serves as simple user feedback — it flashes whenever it receives a valid command and sends a keystroke back to the PC. When the mode is toggled between Blu-ray and DVD menus it flashes to indicate the new mode — a long flash followed by a single short one for Blu-ray, a long flash followed by two short ones for DVD.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. It works well enough for my needs, though as those needs only extend as far as PowerDVD and a particular remote control it's rather basic and much more could be done with the hardware. I have uploaded the source code and a schematic for the project to my website as it currently stands for those who are interested.