Cordless Phone Remote Control

Rotten Jalapeno

I just bought a waterproof cordless phone and I am going to try to turn it into a remote control for my home theater system.· The reason for this is that we have a hot tub outside with outdoor speakers, and when I'm listening to music, if you need to change the volume, station, channel, etc you need to go back inside, soaked and do it.· So what I was thinking is that a waterproof phone would be great.· It has great range, and it can float inside the tub.

I've been poking around the internet to find the phoneline protocol so I can decode the phone buttons and retransmit them as an IR signal.· If I could get the tones from each button than I dont think I will have a problem with the other programing.· So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone knows what I need as far as voltage on the phone line, and Idealy if theres a subroutine out there that decodes the phone line frequencys back into the numbers dialed or something along that line.

Eventually if I get all this set up and working good, another idea I had was to hook it up to my computer·and be able to control the music on my computer, and get feedback from the IDE tags and send it back to the phone through caller ID·telling you what is playing, maybe even let you search through artists, cd's, etc.

But I guess I need to get the basics down before·I can start doing the fun stuff.·

So if anyone has any suggestions or code that I might be able to use (for the basic stamp or the prop chip, probably the prop would be better) I'd love to hear it.·

allanlane5

A MUCH simpler solution would be to go to Radio Shack, and get an IR-Repeater. It looks like two little pyramids. What it does is, one pyramid is an IR-Reciever and RF-Transmitter. It recieves your IR Remote's signal, converts it to RF, and sends it on.

The other pyramid is an RF-Reciever and IR-Transmitter. It recieves the RF signal from the other pyramid, and sends IR to your stereo. This lets you control your indoor stereo from an outside IR remote control.

That solution would be MUCH simpler, and cheaper, and faster to implement, than trying to interface to a waterproof telephone.

Rotten Jalapeno

I thought about that, but that would be half as fun, not waterproof, and you would still need a repeater for each location you want to use it in. I do agree, that would be much easier/cheaper but then what would I do with the little free time I have and money?
Plus, I do like the page feature on the phones

FlyingFishFinger

I'm semi confused. Is this a cordless phone that just plugs into the phone jack in the wall or is it something else? Do you want to tap into the actual phone line that goes into the wall?
If so, I have done this and can point you in the right direction, if you haven't found what you need. First off, the phone line puts several things together: Ringing signal, data, power. In addition, the phone line references to its own wires, not to ground. To interface that, you can a) roll your own solution using a 600:600 phone line interface (See this article which I used: http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/downloads/nvcolumns/Nuts_Volts_Download_V1.asp...........Column # 19). b) You can use a DAA IC which is rather expensive, for example these from Zarlink : MH8842, MH88435, MH88437. These are available from www. avnet.com for ~$20
Then, once you have the interface, you could use a MT8880 DTMF transceiver with the Stamp and then send your IR signals from the Stamp. This is more or less what I am doing for Science Fair, minus the IR plus some other details.
Good luck
Raf

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
You've got to play the game.
You can't win.
You can't break even, except on a very cold day.
It doesn't get that cold.
~Laws of Thermodynamics~