Turn your iPhone into a remote for $250

by Ben Drawbaugh posted Jun 14th 2008 at 6:07PM

Anyone who's spent any time playing with an iPhone or a iPod Touch knows that its multi-touch interface is a hugh step forward in touch screen technology. So it's no wonder that everyone wants to control all of their electronics this way; and with the imminent release of Apple's application store, we're sure there are going to be a lot of interesting applications. The new AirRemote hits close to home for us though, as we're always looking for the next best thing in remotes. The big catch here is the price, while most universal remotes are less than $200, the AirRemote needs a little help from a home automation guru's favorite hardware, the GC-100 from Global Cache. The GC-100 is basically an Ethernet to IR and RS-232 bridge that helps the iPhone fill in a big missing feature that any HT remote needs, an IR blaster. The problem is it isn't cheap, 'cause as cool as this idea is, at $550 it's a bit expensive -- assuming $300 for an iPod Touch, $150 for the GC-100, and $100 for the software. But the price isn't even the biggest problem though, the real issue is a remote without any hard buttons isn't very useful for the usual HT duties like; fast forward, rewind, channel up, and volume. Because having to look down to hit the buttons, makes the remote impossible to use without taking your eyes off the action.

Filed under: Remotes

Tags: AirRemote, Global Cache, GlobalCache, iPhone, iPod Touch, IpodTouch

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Highest Ranked

Mark @ Jun 14th 2008 6:22PM

In other words, bloody useless eye candy.

Highly Ranked

michael @ Jun 14th 2008 7:54PM

wow. what a rip-off. i could turn my treo into a remote for $25. http://www.novii.tv/palm/

Highest Ranked

Lakeonaut @ Jun 14th 2008 8:29PM

So what's "emminit" mean. Is a Dallas running back involved?

Neutral

Zack @ Jun 14th 2008 9:03PM

Yeah, no offense, but this post is full of grammar errors

Neutral

phanbouy @ Jun 14th 2008 10:19PM

wow all of a sudden the ESPN remote looks like a value

Neutral

palehorse @ Jun 15th 2008 12:04AM

HAHAHAHA

no.

Neutral

seanc @ Jun 15th 2008 2:55AM

I just came back from WWDC and one of the interesting things I found out was that Bluetooth access is severely limited through the SDK. A third party PS3 bluetooth remote would be really fun to make but right now it doesn't seem to be feasible with the curren trestricitons.

Neutral

zargon @ Jun 15th 2008 11:44AM

For that price, you might as well get the higher end Philips Pronto units that have been designed from the ground up to be a remote, rather than a second thought.

Though, I have thought about using a old computer as an IR Blaster and creating a web interface so I could use any computer to control my equipment. I guess it is the same concept, but at least I would have more control over it.

Neutral

oscar @ Jun 15th 2008 4:37PM

Thing is, the touchscreen on the iPod / iPhone is way ahead of the pronto. Pronto also needs its own base station a la global cache to work properly (i.e. over RF) - i believe Airremote, would work out less if anything (and u get an iPod!)

No other remote can do any of the funky interface things an Apple device can. I've a friend who works at SMC in London (the guy behind airremote apparently owns this company) and i saw a demo of airremote last week - You can literally flick through channels! They had it operating their lighting system too...but the best was the DVD server, called Kaleidescape, because you'll be able to flick through your movies using cover flow. Not sure if that works for Apple TV, but that would be cool.

Neutral

Siva @ Jun 16th 2008 7:32AM

Why not use gestures on the iPhone for the activity. Like swipe left to rewind, swipe right for fast forward, etc.

Neutral

Ben @ Jun 16th 2008 7:36AM

That's a really cool idea if that is how it works, but based on the pictures it doesn't appear that way. I would think you'd have to go to a dedicate screen for watching TV, navigating menus etc to prevent accidental actions.

But you are right, if you had a screen where a swipe up was up, a swipe down was down and a tap was select it would make a cool directional navigation control.

Neutral

Geff99 @ Jun 23rd 2008 2:07PM

While not a complete remote, I use my iphone with something called iSignal to control music as a remote control.

Isignal cost me $25.00 for the full version. It permits me to have complete control of the itunes on my imac. For the Iphone, I see that album artwork, pick the songs, decide which playlist to play, which song to play, decide whether to stream the music to which ever room I want to listen to, and everything else that I can do using Itunes.

I had already set up an airport express in my home theater room. I run a mini plug to toslink cable from the airport express to my Yamaha RX-V2700 AV receiver. I simply put my AV receiver on CD and using my iphone I stream music, podcasts, or audiobooks to my AV digitally and have the receiver, with its superior DAC converters give me perfect songs.

It must be noted that all my music is encoded using Apple lossless codec which permits me to listen to great sounding music.

However, I can not stream video signals from iTunes. If I could, this would be really awesome. Unfortunately, the MPAA, along with Apple, will not allow this.

Neutral

Bruzer @ Jun 17th 2008 5:50PM

Ben, I know you've been looking for a new remote. Why don't you get one from Universal Remote. Something like the MX-850. I personally have the MX-700 and LOVE IT. Very customizable from my laptop. Just plug it in and sync up the updates and tweak away. You can put macros on any hard button. They give you plenty of empty buttons. Not to mention that the button grouping at the top can be paged through. Meaning that for each device you program you can put in 40 extra items that you can page through some of the least used buttons on the old remote. I tried the harmony and hate the automatic macro generation. Check it out at least...
http://www.universalremote.com/product_detail.php?model=38

Neutral

marc fleury @ Jun 22nd 2008 9:49AM

Funny,

we are trying to do exactly the same thing in Open Source:

www.openremote.org (not fully complete: we were hoping to launch at CEDIA US.)

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