Let's Get Technical – What Can You See in the Video
For some technical details what you can see in this video, the iPhone interface is talking over WiFi to an OpenRemote ALIX box which is the wireless router-looking box on the table. In a typical home setup, you'd place the OpenRemote Box (a.k.a ORB) somewhere within the reach of the iPhone or iPod Touch wireless 802.11 radio. In this sense it is very similar to how you'd install your WiFi router at home. You can have ORB use your existing home network or let it act as a stand-alone wireless access point.
The OpenRemote Box hosts some of our custom code, Java VM running on Linux OS. In this current iteration, the Java code processes the incoming HTTP invocation from the iPhone and translates it to an infrared command, taking advantage of the LIRC codebase. The two other supported media for ORB we are working on are X10 over a serial connection and KNX over IP network. These should follow pretty soon (we've scheduled them for our 1.0 release).
The other piece of hardware you see in the video is the small black box on top of the ORB. This is our infrared extension to OpenRemote Box, capable of receiving and transmitting infrared signals. We are only using it to transmit infrared at the moment, not receiving, since the iPhone works over a WiFi connection. The box is a CommandIR II transmitter which we currently recommend as an infrared extension for our reference implementation and OpenRemote Box.
And since the IR extension is not used for receiving infrared signals, you can also hide it behind your cabinet along with the OpenRemote Box if you wish. As a side note, the infrared extension also supports receiving infrared signals via a cable extender so in the future if you need to use ORB via an old-fashioned infrared remote you only need to bring another cable with a receiver out of the cabinet, not the whole IR extension.
The final piece of hardware in the video is the infrared extender cable, the thin wire which you'd pull to the devices you need to control from your iPhone. In our demo the wire and IR transmitter lays in front of the MacBook laptop that hosts an infrared receiver designed be to used with the original Apple Remote.
What's Next?
While a lot of what you see in the video seems very specific to Apple hardware, OpenRemote does not intend to be an Apple-only project. For example, we support a host of infrared vendors via our Beehive database. You can browse the currently supported list of remote vendors and models in the UI Composer demo application. If your favorite remote is not listed there yet, let us know. We'd be happy to work with you to get the infrared codes recorded and shared with the community through Beehive. We will also later post instructions how to record your own infrared remote codes with OpenRemote Box.
As you can tell from the video, OpenRemote on infrared is already working. It is code complete and we are working on a milestone release to be pushed out (that will come out before the final 1.0 release) that lets community members to test and play with it. Right now we are working on the deployment, fixing last-minute issues that are arising and waiting for our iTunes AppStore to be approved (if anyone from Apple is listening, could you hurry up with the paperwork, it's been weeks already! Sheesh).
Stay tuned, more news to come!
