A simple web app for sending out IR signals to control OSRAM LED Star RGB light bulbs from an ESP32, written using nanoFramework.
IRWA can either be deployed directly using the most recent deployment image and nanoff, or compiled and deployed manually from source using the Visual Studio 2022 solution, which requires the nanoFramework extension for Visual Studio. With this extension being installed, the solution can then be opened and either directly executed and debugged (which gives access to useful debug output), or built and deployed to the board.
Please note that, in any case, the WiFi network must be configured on the ESP32. This can be easily done using the nanoFramework extension for Visual Studio - after filling out all the required fields, the WiFi options should be set to "Enable". When the application is debugged, the debug output will show when the connection was successfully established (and with which IP).
By default, the the infrared signal is sent through the pin 23. The anode (+) of a suitable IR LED should be connected to that pin, and the cathode (-) to the pin GND. This was tested successfully with a HSDL-4230 that was readily available, which was connected directly without an additional resistor.
It is possible to change the API URL by clicking onto the logo in the app - but this parameter is only useful for advanced setups and should remain empty for most cases.
This application consists of a backend, written in C# using nanoFramework, that provides both an API and the frontend itself, which is written in plain HTML/JS/CSS. As the application was written in just a few days, it is very simple and doesn't feature options to configure or customize it from within the app, as this would go beyond the scope of this project. The layout or appearance of the buttons and the commands they send out, however, can be easily modified by just changing the main index.html - with this, the application could be easily modified to control other IR devices.
The IR commands are 32-bit unsigned integers encoded using the NEC protocol - see the IrSenderNec.cs file for the implementation of that. As there aren't many examples or resources available on how to do this, the class has been documented extensively to provide an additional "learning value" and explain how to send out IR signals on an ESP32. For this project, the commonly used NEC protocol is implemented, where commands are 32-bit unsigned integers which get modulated onto a 38kHz wave using PWM.
The web server is a custom implementation using the HttpListener from System.Net.Http, executing the incoming requests using a thread pool (in the hopes of better performance due to the recycling of the same threads instead of spawning new ones for every request). The web server implementation was also optimized for improved stability and resilience against network outages or other unexpected issues and should recover from such events. It has support for HTTPS, but while testing this feature, the app became almost unusable in terms of speed, which is why HTTP is used for now. That, unfortunately, prevents the app from being installed as PWA, as all other requirements for this would be fulfilled.
The IRWA logo (appicon.svg, logo.svg) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Copyright 2024, Maximilian Bauer
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