Reverse engineering IR remotes, and implementing them into my own projects has been an interest of mine for the past few embedded projects I worked on at home. The hardware overhead for getting a wireless IR transceiver working is basically nothing, and there's something especially pleasing about requiring line-of-sight for accurate transmission.
The novelty of line-of-sight works especially well for game-based projects!
I just got some new air conditioners for the shelter-in-place summer, and I'd like to control them from a central thermostat, but it's annoying that the remote sends "next mode" or "toggle power", with no way to jump to a known state.<p>The cool/fan/dehumidify/heat mode is indicated with a vertical column of LEDs (EdgeStar AP14001HS), so I can probably stick a photocell at the top, and have a program repeatedly send "mode" while watching the brightness level, to deduce the state and stop on the correct one. The fan speed uses a different column of LEDs, but stopping on "dehumidify" forces the fan to low. The temperature can be set blindly because it stops at the minimum/maximum value.<p>I haven't actually tried to build anything yet, but it at least seems possible using a Raspberry Pi with 1 analog photocell and 1 IR transmitter.
I was recently toying with the idea of hacking on my old Gameboy Color, I'm excited to see this on the front page. Has anybody else had some positive experiences hacking their GBC?
This is amazing! I'd be interested in more details about capturing the IR signal, both by the invasive method and the "operate an LED in reverse" method.<p>At one point I thought about trying to do something similar with my old garage door opener, but ended up not pursuing it.
I always thought it was kind of a bummer that so few games leveraged the Gameboy Color's IR.<p>AFAIK, the only game that did anything with it was Pokemon Gold/Silver and their "Mystery Gift" trading feature.
Awesome. I had a smartphone with an IR emitter once. Tried using it to control my air conditioners but for some reason it couldn't do what this Game Boy can do.
Why are you using gifs instead of HTML5 video? Not only they take a long time to download for visitors, but you are using up your server resources too.
Gameboys are neat, but I'm kind of sad that people are <i>still</i> mostly focused on hacking on the wimpy-microcomputing tech of 30 years ago. Nobody seems all that interested in hacking on the wimpy-microcomputing tech of today! (Well, except Arduinos—but is it still hacking if that's what they're <i>for</i>?)<p>Imagine what can you accomplish by writing custom firmware for modern IoT devices, e.g.<p>• a smart thermostat (Nest et al)<p>• a smart speaker<p>• a smart remote (Harmony et al)<p>Another very under-explored device category is the Shenzhen knock-off portable game console (not the Bittboy; the cheap stuff.) These sometimes have surprisingly good hardware in them, but only use it to run (bad!) emulators that don't take full advantage of the CPU power / memory capacity / screen resolution / etc. Native code could get a lot done on these platforms!