Ping from Morocco

In a previous article , I reverse engineered my TV's infrared protocol as a backup measure in case the remote controller stops working. A couple of years later, it finally happened. Luckily I have infrared support in my phone, a 2022 Redmi 10. It comes preinstalled with an app that supports multiple infrared protocols including the NEC one. Unfortunately, none of the installed NEC versions were compatible with my TV since it uses a modified version of the protocol. I decided to take matters into my own hands. The infrared documentation for Android isn't lengthy, but it doesn't have to be. It boils down to sending a series of ON/OFF pulses with a given carrier frequency: public void transmit (int carrierFrequency, int[] pattern); To do that, I converted the functions of the previous project from C to Kotlin. The differences were minimal. In the android version, I had to construct an array of pulses whereas in the C version, I sent them immediately by switching PORTB ...

Context : One of my earliest paychecks went into a cheap 22" TV. It's not fancy at all, but it was a nice upgrade from the old Sony Trinitron TV that was starting to show its age. The new TV has a brand name of "Vision", which is less glamorous than "Sony", but it has been working well so far, so I can't really complain. Just the other day, I found out that it is possible to get it to record something while it's on standby. It's a feature I never knew I needed until I discovered it. A couple of months after I got it, I ran into a problem with the remote controller. Luckily it turned out to be caused by a dead battery. Even though it was trivial to fix, this minor incident planted the seed of fear in me. Since the TV doesn't have physical buttons, I concluded that it would become useless should the remote stop working for some reason or another. Because of this, I decided to make a backup of the remote in case something happens to it. To d...