Gear of the Year 2021 (1)

2021 was very calm, as far as gear purchases are considered. I'm very happy I have reached this state of tranquility, not chasing variety of new (often cool, but rarely indispensable) gadgets. It seems most things I have, are just OK and good enough. It is a pity though some of them are being phased out by the service providers. 

Entering 2021 I had big backlog of ideas and I'm really happy I managed to accomplish several I had had in mind for many years.

One of them has been a single remote to operate my multimedia system which includes a menagerie of products, among them:

• A Panasonic video projector (~10 years old)
• A Bose Lifestyle audio system (~25 years old)
• An Apple TV as the primary source of video content

As you can imagine each of these has its own remote. The projector has a very sophisticated one, which is used only to power it on and off. The Bose audio system has another, which turns the audio on and off and controls volume. Then there is the Apple TV remote which is used to navigate the multimedia applications. It also has volume buttons but they could not control the Bose. So the starting point were three remotes.

And the answer to the unified remote problem has been the HDMI-CEC protocol. It took me some time to dig into CEC, find a proper way to interface with it and then optimize the hardware (and software). What you see on the picture here is still a fairly heavy version (a larger ATTINY chip, a crystal, and a set of optocouplers to emulate button presses). But id does the job brilliantly, intercepting the Apple TV remote's events and routing them to the Bose audio system. Bose uses RF (instead of infrared) to communicate its remote with the system unit. So I decided to emulate key presses, such that when [Volume Up] is pressed on the Apple remote (and send down the CEC line on the HDMI cable), it is intercepted and "presses" the [Volume Up] key on the Bose remote. The entire circuit fit in a battery compartment of the Bose remote and is powered from the HDMI's 5V line.

There is another part connected to the Panasonic projector - it intercepts the Apple (CEC) on/off  and converts them to Panasonic's proprietary RS-232 interface to power the projector on and off. 

Long story short - it all works very nicely. The Apple TV remote is now the only remote, powers everything on and off and controls volume. So simple. But simplicity is usually difficult to achieve. And this way my own HDMI-CEC integration platform earns the gear of the year 2021 award.

If you're interested in diving deeper into the HDMI-CEC implementation options, start with my CEC-Tiny which is now available on GitHub.