I live in a room with five guys and a house where AA batteries are a scarcity. Because of this (and lazyness) I set out to make my Android Universal Remote

Android Universal Remote

After a couple day’s work, here is the resulting interface. It was customized using Unified Remote, an app that lets you control the mouse / keyboard / etc from your Android device. However, for my remote I made it so it opens programs on the computer. The custom remote was programmed in XML using the BeyondTV remote as a template Each button open a uniquely named small program that immediately closes. It’s only purpose is to trigger EventGhost, the next piece of this system. Eventghost is “an advanced, easy to use and extensible automation tool for MS Windows”. In my case it takes the trigger (the program that opened) and in response tell the TV what to do. In order to “talk” to the TV it uses the last piece of the system, the IR sender / reciever. I used the USB-UIRT for this. Based off of which program was opened by the remote it will trigger a different macro in Eventghost. This would correlate to one or more IR signals to be sent to the TV or Cable Box.

EventGhost macros

Each button that I wanted to press had to be manually “learned” by USB-UIRT’s recieving capability so it knew what IR signal to send to the cable box For example, pressing “SportsCenter” would open SportsCenter.exe on the computer which would trigger the EventGhost SportsCenter macro which would send the IR signals for “1” then “7” then “3”.

Conclusion

There ya go, a working TV & Cable box remote on my phone & tablet. It lags more than the regular remote and for 65 bucks it really isn’t cost effective so I I wouldn’t really reccomend it for anyone for real use. But its pretty cool so….