Friday, March 10, 2017

Magical Black Bean - Infrared control over WiFi/3G/4G



Few weeks ago I've received the Broadlink RM mini 3 Black Bean Smart Home Wifi  Universal IR and I've took some time to test it before I can give more details. 




Is absolutely fantastic ! 

As features:


  • -I was able to record any remote I had around
  • -I was able to connect to it from WiFi or 4G from my mobile
  • -I was able to make scenes for multiple remotes. 


The scenes part is very handy since allows me to control multiple devices with one touch. For example:
-start TV
-wait 1 sec
-start Set-box
-wait 1 sec
-put TV on HDMI 3 input
-change SetBox to channel 5.
-start amplifier

All of that with just one touch from the mobile app.

Learning procedure from the original remotes is very simple, just select the TV to emulate and set which button from virtual remote will be assigned to physical remote.





And for example the TV virtual remote is:






Other important feature was to move all defined remotes to another phone. For this there is a special menu and on one phone we will need to select the "Share to other phones in WLAN" options and on the receiver phone "Import from shared phone in WLAN". In one second I had all my remotes, scripts in the second phone, so no more relearning process. Super !!!.






As for what is inside:
-main processor is a 200MHz Cortex M3 Marvel 88MC200 and for WiFi a 88W8801 chip.
-6 snowflake positioned IR emitter LEDs.
-one IR Receiver for learning the codes from your remotes.




The PCB is looking like:




Make sure that:
- there is direct line of sight between the mini R and your appliances, otherwise the IR reflection will not always work.
-you have a power adapter to deliver 5V since you will not find one in the box. An old phone charger will be just fine.


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