Controlling a heat pump with Raspberry Pi and USB IR Toy
Channel: Chris LeBlanc
Date: 2012-11-11

A quick demo showing how to control a heat pump (or any IR device) using a Raspberry Pi, an IR Toy* from Dangerous Prototypes, a Google Calendar, and a bit of Python code.

I've recorded a bunch of IR codes from my heat pump's remote control and stored them in a file on the Raspberry Pi.  I then added a simple cron job to poll a Google Calendar once every five minutes.  When it gets an event it transmits the code (eg: 20) to the heat pump using the IR toy.  All of these steps are described on the project's wiki.

Most IR codes (eg: RC5) are around 1/10th the length of the codes I needed to record.  Standard tools like Lirc and the IguanaIR transceiver couldn't record the full length of these codes so I needed to take a different approach that would work under Linux.

One of the goals of this project was to keep it as simple and generic as possible.  It's only a few hundred lines of open source Python code, so feel free to dive in and hack away!

For more info on the project, see: https://github.com/crleblanc/hackPump and https://github.com/crleblanc/PyIrToy.
The IR Toy is available from the Dangerous Prototypes site: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/USB_Infrared_Toy

PS: Sorry for the annoying buzz in the video, I think it's my nasty CPU fan.  Maybe time for a new machine.

*Firmware revision 22 or greater