As a zero waste OCD nutter, I end up with a lot of TV and radio devices pulled from dumpsters and 2nd-hand markets. The remote controls (RCs) are almost always missing. For many devices, the whole fucking device becomes totally unusable without the RC. Which is probably why many devices end up in the trash – because the remote was lost or chewed up by a dog.
Apparently humans have not evolved to be smart enough to create an open standard mandating that all appliances with remote controls have a published manual containing the IR signal specs for every function to then enable the signals to be reproduced.
Palm pilots (somewhat viable)
In the 1990s, Palm pilots had integrated infrared sensors w/LED. There was a very useful third-party app enabling physical remote controls to be copied. You could design your own button layout and have a tab for every RC. Of course the problem is that you needed the original RC as a source to copy.
Smartphones (nope)
Smartphones are worse than Palm pilots. IR sensors are RARE. There are IR dongles that can be attached to a smartphone (either USB or headphone jack). It’s a bit redicious if you have to have a dongle hanging off the edge of your phone wherever you go. The phone would not likely slide into an arm strap w/the dongle. So you wouldn’t carry it around, which means you have to keep track of it. It’s something else that can get lost (manufacturers and sellers love that feature).
Universal RCs (nope)
Like OEM remotes, these have a fixed set of buttons. But of course they have to try to guess what buttons will be needed. They include a database of hundreds of signal sets, but you are likely fucked if the device is an obscure or rebranded no name generic. I have radios that have the branding of the grocery store that sold them, FFS. No chance that would be in these preset DBs. I also have 4 different models of the same radio brand, and the RCs are incompatible w/each other same brand device (WTF).
The collective solution
Lobby for policy to force an open standard and then mandate the use of it.
The quazi individual solution (using smartphones)
- Derive a list of smartphones with built-in IR sensors and LEDs.
- Port a FOSS distro of some kind to all those phones.
- Code 2 FOSS apps, one for linux distros and one for f-droid for AOS forks. Or make one app that’s ported to both.
The app should be able to record existing OEM RCs. And in the absence of the OEM RC, it should be able to sync to an open data crowd-sourced DB (which means it should also be able to export datasets to the project).
The quazi individual solution (using dumbphones)
A lot of Sony Ericsson feature phones have IR sensors and an LED for the purpose of syncing the contacts, SMSs, etc. The FOSS Gammu app exploits this. If an app could be pushed to those phones it would basically repurpose otherwise wasted dumbphones to help salvage otherwise wasted RC-less appliances.
In the early days of automation one of the solutions for TVs was to have a separate IR emitter device mounted in front of the TV and pointed toward its sensor that could be controlled over the network. You still need to download or manually program the sequences, but it solves the problem of common handheld devices not having IR emitters.
Network-attached seems sensible even today… so we could have:
smart phone → wifi → AP+switch → wifi or ethernet → IR emitter → non-smart IR-controlled appliance
But of course it doesn’t solve the problem in my thesis: you need to know the sequences for the appliance, which are apparently always a trade secret. So we rely on crowdsourcing data from someone who happened to have the same controller you need and who bothered to copy the sequences and share them. That’s where it all falls apart. I have a lot of obscure appliances unlikely to have shared IR sequence data.