JP1 Remotes

[mtwomey]

I was just curious - has the group ever discussed/considered building our own remote? E.g. using an existing remote "shell" and putting our own electronics in? This would allow much greater flexibility I think.

I have been using JP1 for years, but I can't say I'm very familiar with remote hardware so I don't know if the idea is at all practical from a physical standpoint. I am however quite familiar with microcontrollers as I've been working with them for years on a hobby basis - so I know this part would not present much of a challenge.

Thanks,

-Matt

[unclemiltie]

people have talked about it, there was a guy a while back who was considering taking one of the Flash-based JP1.3 remotes and comletely rewriting the software in it.

The reality is that the hardware is a small part of the design. There are hundreds of thousands of hours in the software in these remotes so if you wanted to build you own, I'd start with the existing hardware and modify the software to do what you want.
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this JP1 stuff is a sickness!

[nuke12]

Matt;

If software was not a problem, what hardware would you add to these little devices?

[mtwomey]

Well,

I wasn't really thinking so much about the hardware (with the exception of more memory) - but it would be nice to have 100% full control over what we're doing software wise. Generating IR remote signals is a relatively simple thing on a modern micocontroller.

I guess I'm not thinking so much in terms of specific things I can't do now that I'd like to do - but more along the lines of what things might become possible or what ideas people might have if we had a common platform/os to work on without any software limitations. Even though there is a lot of shared hardware and code between them, right now most remotes are dealt with on an individual basis and this dilutes focus quite a bit. We're also used to dealing with somewhat meager hardware resources (i.e. we deal in 2, 4 8k of memory when 256k, 512k, 1mb flash ram can be cheaply acquired in a 6 pin pdip or smaller). Right now, we have LCD displays on some remote and we make some use of them - but what if we could do whatever we wanted with them (get feedback for debugging, reminders of our favorite shows, custom instructions for our setup right on the screen so that guests in our house know what to hit to watch TV, ...etc). Right now we run into various mildly annoying limitations with what keys are able to do what, it would be nice if it was just a keypad fully under our control.

I'm just brainstorming here.

Thanks,

-Matt

[The Robman]

Like Bill (unclemiltie) alluded to above, the current crop of JP1 remotes have flash chips rather than the MCU/EEPROM combo found in older remotes, and whereas the MCU in the older remotes was burned in, the ROM in the newer remotes could potentially be completely overlaid, so if you're happy enough with the hardware of the remote, you could potentially write your own firmware to replace the built in firmware.

Now, having said that, I imagine that that would be an enormous undertaking and the ROI would not make it worth it.
_________________
Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!

[mtwomey]

[The Robman]

I don't know if it would be possible to fully flash the MCU as nobody's tried to do it, but it's potentially possible.

Extenders are loaded into the remotes as upgrades. We have a few tricks that we can do to get the necessary info to make them work.
_________________
Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!

[mtwomey]

[underquark]

I thought of ripping the guts out of one remote (8910) and grafting them them into the case of another (a cheap non-OFA remote with lots of small buttons) but new remotes are coming along all the time and I'm currently happy with my 8820's so abandoned the project.

I know a few people who have built their own cars. Without exception they have sold them soon after, bought a "real" car (and started building another one, of course, when winter came round). But if it entertains you, why not?

[Barf]

You may like to check out this project. Since the website is 99% in German, here is a brief summary: Recently (2006-20007), some German TV channels tried to establish the "interactive remote" called "Betty". The project failed miserably and was discontinued in 2007. However, the hardware is quite powerful (see the WiKi pages of the link) with LCD 160 x 128 Pixel, LPC2220 - 32bit arm7tdmi-s cpu, and 8 Mbyte flash. It can be had "used" for surplus prices. An open-source project "Boop" was started to write free software for it.

Have not tried it yet, but it is on my todo-list.

[classicsat]

Hardwarewise, something like an ATMEGA could be used. They are popular in the electronics hobby these days.

There are a number of programming packages and interfaces available.

As for code on the chip, it could be somewhat modular.
One would have to avoid patents.

The big question would be the cost of such a device.

If you are building just a board, what case will it be built into? There may or may not be trademark issues.

Or would you build a whole remote, case and membrane also?

Keep in mind, the majority of JP1 users (I assume) are just turn key users, probably not interested in new hardware.

Although Betty sounds cool, there can only be so many of them.

[unclemiltie]

If you wanted to, I'm sure that you could completely re-flash the UEI JP1.3 remotes with a completely home-grown OS. You may toast a few in the process since you'd have to figure out how to use the UEI communication pieces that we use for JP1 to put a new uploader in place and if it doesn't work, there really isn't anything left behind. But given what I know about the remotes, I'm sure that it could be done. the question in my mind is "why"

What would you like to see the remote do that it can't today (assuming that an extender exists) Most of what you'd want to do could be baked into an extender pretty simply and you wouldn't have to do it from scratch.


But, if you found some JP1.3 hardware that you liked, you could probably use most of the tools that are around here (at least the assembler) to build some code to stuff into the remote. The trick is getting your new code right the first time so that you can then continue to build on it.

The cool thing about the new JP1.3 remotes is that they have virtually unlimited memory as long as you are thinking that the remote is going to be loaded by a PC somehow. Most of the FLASH in the remotes (and the ROMs in the older ones) is taken up by either:

1: all of the built-in setup codes for thousands of devices, and the protocols that go along with them

2: a lot of code to allow the user to set things up from the keypad.

If you make the assumption going in that all of the device setup information (protocols and key values) would come from a computer, then there is more memory than you could ever know how to use.


To see what I mean by this, go find the source for one of the extenders that is out there from a JP1 remote. These basically take over the remote and don't hand control back to the built-in firmware once they are activated. The code fits into < 512 bytes (but does call some of the original ROM to do the heavy lifting but even that code I'm sure is reasonably small.)


If you're interested in taking something like this on, I'd say start looking at the Extender sources that are out there and then really bone up on the Samsung S3F80 processor. I'm sure that if I thought about it for more than a couple of minutes, I could even fix up some way for you to test out your boot loader and startup/communication stuff without erasing the entire remote so that when it restarts you could get it back to "normal"


-bill
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this JP1 stuff is a sickness!