Home automation of any kind is a pretty tough market in which many products generally create more problems than they can solve. However, there are a rare few gadgets that don't aim too high or too low, and the results can be profoundly useful to the right customers. A new campaign on Kickstarter might just be primed to hit that sweet spot with a product called AnyMote, a remote-controlled universal remote. It aims to put your phone in charge of just about anything with an IR receiver, and even several Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices (as support is added).

The project was initiated by a fairly well-known developer, Color Tiger, the creator of Smart IR Remote. Building upon that experience, AnyMote is meant to work around the limitations of using an integrated IR transmitter on some phones. It's designed to be completely wireless, operating just on a pair of AA batteries that should last for about a year. Thanks to this freedom, it can be hidden just about anywhere as long as it has line-of-sight to anything it's meant to talk to. Communication between AnyMote and your phone or tablet takes place over Bluetooth 4.0, which may still leave out many older devices, but supports anything fairly modern.

This is far from the first time we've seen attempts to build a partially-automated IR blaster, but many of the previous attempts have left customers disappointed by a lackluster software experience. If you're already acquainted with Smart IR Remote, the same app is used to control AnyMote. It currently holds a 4.6 star rating from over 9,000 users, so you know quite a few people are already happy with it. In addition to the existing Tasker integration, there are also plans to add support for Android Wear, IFTTT, Google Now, and other hardware and services that can be further used to customize your experience. There is also an SDK in the works so developers can control AnyMote in other creative ways.

The campaign timeline and goals appear very realistic. The team has already spent a year developing the hardware and says that the prototypes are already in regular use and ready to go into production. If the project is funded by mid-October (45 days from now), shipments are expected to follow 7 months later in May. Seeing as how the pledge total has already hit $16k of its $50k target after just a few hours, it's pretty likely that this one will go through.

There are a few different options to back AnyMote, but the early bird pricing is disappearing fast. Additionally, backers that pledge $20 or more will also receive plans and source code to build an AnyMote using an Arduino board, just in case you can't wait to get your hands on the final product. Hit the widget below to check out all of the deets!

[Kickstarter]