Has anyone ever done this? What I want to do is have a little remote, probably serial, in a different room to control winamp with, maybe a little LCD on top. If you have any information about this kind of thing it would be very appreciated.
I'm working on something similar. I managed to get my hands on three keyboards, controllers intact. So i've got to find which combinations of jumped track give the keyboard commands ctrl+p for example. When i've found these i can solder PTM buttons to the track and put them in a fancy box. Simpler Way, Get a Matrix Orbital MX2 USB and use the LCDC WinAmp plug in to assign WinAmp functions to the GPI buttons on the display.
I've done something like that, but not only for winamp. I had a spare 8051 microcontroller board, added an IR sensor, separate power supply,one relay mounted over the power button. The software decodes the RC5 IR signal and sends the command to the computer via COM port. The computer runs Girder in background; it captures the ASCII from the COM port and sends messages to OS (any windows version).
even easier: key a kepboard encoder you wire the pins off serial cable to the headers on encoder which plugs in line with keyboard to ps/2 connector and then when key on remote is pressed , programmed keys come out of encoder as standard keyboard presses. Hagstrom Elec
Logitech increased support for their keyboards, so now I can control winamp even whilst it's minimized, so I don't use this anymore, but I made one: Comctrl (Serial port) control for winamp REALLY easy to wire up, pretty much just putting a button between a two wires (times 4) if you want more buttons you can as well, it's not too hard. A pic of mine is here: the two pin header is for an LED
I've gotten a keyboard to use, but I can't find the clear sheet that tells me what the buttons do when pressed! I ripped it apart to paint it but i think some of the parts were blown away, because I left it out there for about a week during which it rained and was very windy. I am going to try hooking it up and shorting the pins until I find some workable combination.
i know it defeats the whole object of building one, which is fun, but you can get a creative remote that controls winamp from ebay for like £10. Mound the IR receiver in your case and its not too bad
i saw an article about a guy who ran a load of serial cable through his house, to put an mp3 box in a room downstairs when his comp was upstairs, cant remember for the life of me where i saw it... if u take a look at: http://www.markuszehnder.ch/projects/lcdplugin/ it'll take inputs from practically anything, read the HD44780 HOWTO, it tells u how to setup simple parallel switches or seriel etc, reasonably straight forward...
$1.99 for a remote. Unbelieveable. Okay, a little question: The IR transmitter is a lot like a LED, and so is the reciever (correct me if I am wrong) Would it be possible to remove the transmitter and the reciever LEDs and solder them together for a wired remote? Or is that just dumb?
seems pretty simple i wanna try it just wondering how did u actually wire up the buttons like which buttons went into which pins can ya show us some curcuit diagrams? thnx
Yeah, that sounds simple, yet functional. I guess other programs can be controlled as well. Can you say which wires to cross with the buttons?
I'd make a diagram but I don't have any diagramming programs out there buuuuut... The one in the program looks like this : here Basically wiring a pin (x) to a switch to pin 4 of the serial port. Good wiring excercise for beginners
i suppose just make the wire your self... or you can get a multimeter and you can see which wire leads to which pin... hopefully that works cause thats what im gonna be doin
I have built one of these a couple of month ago. you can see the result here I'm planning on doing the 15 button project.
