标签: remote

I was chatting to Daniel Guidera the other day. Daniel is the graphic artist who works with EE Times.   During our conversation, Daniel informed me that he's a member of a gaggle of graphic artists who search out, share, and discuss the graphical nuances of old adverts (hey, everyone is entitled to have a hobby).   A few days ago, Daniel shared this link from the History's Dumpster website, whose mission it is to save glorious trash, kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk of yesterday and today from the landfill of time...   The main topic of conversation was a TV remote control system called the ChannelScan, which you could use to jazz up an existing TV equipped only with an electromechanical channel selector knob. Although it may have been the height of sophistication in its day (I doubt it, but I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt), in hindsight the ChannelScan really was a bit of a clunker. The hand-held controller was connected by a 25-foot wire to the actuator, which had to be physically attached to the VHF channel knob on the front of the TV. The actuator unit contained an AC-powered motor, which was used to turn the VHF channel knob.   It's not hard to imagine that having a 25-foot cable snaking its way across your family room was a recipe for "interesting times." I can easily visualize my dad and I watching a soccer game on TV and my mom sauntering across the room carrying some tasty treats when... ker-thump... food flying everywhere, plus we just missed the winning goal!   Actually, the history of TV remote controls is quite interesting. In the early days, different companies tried all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas based on the technologies available at the time. These systems included ultrasound (dogs hated this one) and visible light (so turning on a house light could trigger a channel change by mistake). Eventually, manufacturers moved to infrared and, more recently, wireless controllers.   Now, although we might smirk condescendingly at some of the early efforts, I'm here to tell you that they could be a real blessing to some users. I remember when I was about eight years old and my granddad (on my mom's side) had a stroke that completely paralyzed him down one side. (As an aside, there have been such amazing advances in recent years with regard to rehabilitating stroke victims that -- if we had known then what we know now -- my granddad might have been afforded an almost complete recovery.)   Since granddad couldn’t look after himself, he came to live with us. We only had a small "two up, two down" house, so we turned our dining room into granddad's living/sleeping room. My mom and dad purchased a second-hand black-and-white television to go in granddad's room (it was actually bigger and better than the one we had in our family room, but I'm not bitter LOL).   The problem was that this was the early 1960s and TV remote controls were rare items; I don’t think anyone in my family had actually seen one in the flesh, as it were. Thus, when granddad wanted to switch to another channel, he had to ask one of us to do it for him. This may not seem like a terrible burden, especially when you recall that we had only two or three channel options in those days of yore, but granddad was a "channel flicker" for his time -- he constantly worried that he was missing something interesting on "the other side" and he loved to switch back and forth between channels. Come on, admit it, you sometimes do the same thing, but it's a lot easier when you have a modern remote control in your hand.   My dad mulled over this problem for quite some time. I remember the day when he returned home from work carrying a 5-foot long wooden broom pole. Using his pocket knife, he whittled one end down to a 1/4" diameter pointer, and then he presented the finished product to granddad.   This may not seem like much when you hear me waffling on about it here, but I remember how this changed my granddad's life. You cannot imagine just how empowering this was; no longer did he have to ask for our aid -- he was the master of his own channel-surfing destiny -- the baron of broadcast; the king of communications; the emperor of entertainment; but we digress...   More recently, we have the concept of the "Universal Remote Controller." Don’t make me laugh! In our family room we currently have three large controllers -- one for the cable box, one for the television itself (for some reason the cable controller can't handle the TV's volume), and one for the DVD player. On top of that, we have two smaller controllers -- one for the Apple TV and one for the Amazon Fire TV Stick. And, now I come to think about it, we also have a bunch of Wii controllers scattered around.     There are another three controllers in our study, two in our bedroom, and I daren't even take a guess at the number of additional devices that are lurking around the house.   What's the answer to this madness? Well, I firmly believe that voice control is going to be the wave of the future, perhaps a more advanced version of the interface sported by the Amazon Echo (see also Have you heard of the Amazon Echo? ). And, if we look a little further out, I think this voice control will be augmented by embedded vision that supports capabilities like gesture control. Can you imagine being able to point at the TV and spread your fingers apart to zoom in on a particular play in a football match, for example; also to be able to pan around the screen, rewind, fast-forward, and zoom out again, all with a flick of a finger and a twist of the wrist?   As John Lennon might have said: "You may say that I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one..." What are your thoughts on all this? Will we one day be freed from the need to surround ourselves with a plethora of "Universal" remote controls, or are we destined to be obliged to move into larger houses just to have the room to store all of the little scamps we'll need to make it through the day?

Finally. I am now not the only person who is annoyed by the fact that with all of the small, and increasingly smaller, consumer electronics devices in our lives, the only one you can find with any ease when you have misplaced it is your cell phone. Now joining me are David Schneider and Drew. About the only consumer electronics device that I can find after it has been lost is my cell phone: you can use another phone to call it up. When it rings, if you or a friend is nearby, you can find out where it is. But forget about the half dozen or so TV remotes, two or three MP3 players, and any number of electronic devices that have entered our lives, though. No doubt similarly plagued is Drew, an illustrator and artist whose drawings are popular with college students and who makes his efforts available on his Toothpaste for Dinner Website . I came across his most recent effort ( shown below ) in the local student newspaper. (E-thing marketers should take note of the demographics). It shows a saddened device user and has the following caption: " Replace me with a new one. (Why haven't you dropped me or lost me yet?") Why haven't you lost me yet? (Courtesy of Drew at www.toothpastefordinner.com )   More substantive in his contribution to the topic of lost E-things is David Schneider. In his article " Forget-me- not beacons, " in the July IEEE Spectrum Magazine, he describes his lifelong battle with losing things. While owners of iPhones now can purchase a variety of radio beacons they can attach to their clothes or whatever, what if, like Schneider (and me) you do not have an iPhone? ( Panasonic is also offering a similar capability according to the brochure contained in the package with my wireless home phone ). Inspired by a teardown he read on EETimes, he describes the do-it-yourself project he undertook to build a transmitter that he could attach to devices and a similarly compact receiver. It made use of an off-the-shelf Nike+iPod transmitter that he modified and a receiver he built using an Arduino Pro Mini and a Nordic radio receiver. Of course, the three of us are not the only ones who are frustrated by this proliferation of small, easily-losable electronic devices and no way to find them. Do a Google search and you will see dozens of links to products that you can attach to your various items, including E-things, that will signal you in various ways, by some sort of sound, by sending an alert to your phone, cell phone or email address, either immediately, telling you you have misplaced it. The advantage of such devices is that they can be applied to many of the various small personal items that inhabit our lives, electronic or not. And I have tried out many of them. Some work, some don't. But usually, because they are add-ons, they also get lost. And what if you lose something to which a beacon has not been attached? Or lose the beacons, or forget where you put the extra ones until you needed to attach one? For E-things why can't this capability be built in to each consumer device, especially the smaller and more loseable ones. If the manufacturers of all these wondrous devices were serious about making consumers happy, such capabilities would not only be included, but sold as a must-have feature. The ideas are there, in their multitudes in the patents that are applied for. What I notice about the patents, though, is that most are individuals, unaffiliated with any major electronics company, and having run into the problem in their own lives, have come up with a solution and waited for the companies to NOT beat a path to their door. I don't think this problem is going away. It will probably get worse, especially with all the grand plans for a wireless Internet of Things. Right now we are talking about maybe half a dozen such devices at most that each of us depends on to some degree. In the IoT world, in our homes, autos and personal lives we will no doubt be dealing with dozens of such devices. And because they are wireless, easily misplace-able. My first thought about why such capabilities are not built into most electronic devices is economic: it is not in the financial self-interest of the companies to incorporate such a capability. Not only is there the cost of incorporating such a feature, there is the loss in potential sales of a new device when I lose the old one and have buy a new one. Because I know that the smaller the device the more likely I am to misplace it, I usually buy two on my initial purchase. So, why would a company invest in a adding feature that would virtually guarantee to cut its sales in half? ( Truth be told, though, I usually buy three, because most consumer electronics executives' ideas of long term planning is about three months to a year: if the device sales do not immediately go off the charts in that time, it is taken off the market and never seen again. ) More likely it is a problem that is too complex for the industry to solve, even though there are dozens of systems sold to allow major organisations and companies to track goods around the country, around a building, or on an industrial campus using such things as GPS and RFID tags. Beyond the cost and sophistication of such systems, what is appropriate for finding lost E-things in the home may not be appropriate for when we are in the car, or in the office, or out shopping. I guess it is just a problem that is beyond the capabilities of an industry that brought us the microprocessor, the Internet, and the Internet of Things. Too bad. I will just have to face a future of either constantly misplacing the dozens of wireless IoT devices with which I'll be sharing my life, or not buying them at all. The latter seems very appealing right now.

Several days ago, Eugene Polley (1915 – 2012) passed away. An engineer and engineering manager for Zenith Electronics, Eugene was most widely known for inventing the first wireless remote control for television. These days, younger folks take things like remote controls for granted, but it's not all that long ago that the entire idea seemed revolutionary. For example, when I was a kid of about six years old (circa 1963), my grandfather had a stroke, so he came to live with us. We only had a small house, so we turned the dining room into a bedroom for him. The stroke left granddad completely paralyzed down one side, which resulted in him spending most of his time in bed. This explains why we got the second TV in our house (black and white, of course), because this gave granddad something to do. On the front of the television were four push-buttons, which you used to swap channels. Actually, we had only three channels in those days, so the fourth button was a spare, I guess. We didn't have a remote control. I don't think my parents had even heard about such a thing. Instead, my dad purchased a wooden broom pole, which granddad used to push the buttons on the TV from the comfort of his bed. It's strange to think that this pretty much counted as state-of-the-art for those days. The thing is that I remember granddad being "as happy as a clam" because he could change the channel himself whenever he wished—he no longer had to request someone to do it for him, so this humble broom pole was empowering in its own way. I wonder what granddad would have thought about today's high-definition color televisions with their hundreds of channels. I also wonder what granddad would have thought about modern remote controls, which are jam-packed with buttons and functions. Last but not least, I wonder what Eugene Polley would have thought about The Clicker , which is an all-in-one uber-gadget that fuses the remote control with the ever-important bottle cap opener in one sleek device.     Described as being "Engineered to withstand the manliest of man caves and case after case of openings," The Clicker is programmed with over 800 factory pre-sets and works with almost all major cable and satellite dish boxes. The Clicker supports twin view and Picture-in-Picture functions for multiple game watching, and can be universally programmed for up to eight components, including your TV, DVD player, Cable box, DVR, Satellite, CD and AMP. Hmmm, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around this (grin).  

I've always considered system-level debugging as one of the most difficult engineering challenges. It requires experience and mentoring (neither of which you'll get in school); the ability to think both outside and inside the box; the stamina to examine and re-examine all your assumptions, data, and tests; and use of multiple disciplines as you work through a problem that may involve one or more of circuitry, software, and mechanical functions. And then there those dumb but simple problems that turn out to not be problems at all, just a misreading of the observed symptoms. I recently had some intermittent buttons on the keypad of a TV remote control—one of those $10 universal ones you can buy anywhere. Sure, I could have just tossed it out, but that's no fun. I had opened this one before, and the problem was one I've seen on many such remotes, cordless phones, and similar units. They use a keypad assembly made of conductive elastomer dots which are supposed to complete a circuit on the PC board. In time, the dots start oozing some gunk as the dot material begins to decompose, and the gunk inhibits any low-resistance circuit closure through the dot. I have a two-phase repair process: first, I clean the dots and the associated PC board with alcohol or degreaser. If that doesn't work, I glue small circles of aluminum foil onto each elastomeric contact, so real metal is now closing the circuit, while the gunk can no longer interfere. Sure, it's a lot of work, but it is oh-so-satisfying. But this last go-round had me puzzled for a few minutes. Here's why: I had the remote control mounted in an angled vise—the kind you use when working on PC boards—so it wouldn't move around as I worked on it. I went through my usual cleaning steps, and was ready for a check of all the keys on the unit. This remote control has a tiny LED in the upper corner, which flashes whenever you push any button, which gives a nice bit of user feedback, and is also handy for checking that I cleaned all the keys. Wait a moment: the LED was on, even when no keys were depressed. I figured that one or more of the keys was stuck "on", so I checked the PC board for shorts, a stray filament of wire, anything. Everything seemed OK. So, I next took out the battery (in preparation for some continuity checks with the ohmmeter), and the LED stayed on even then. This meant one of several things: perhaps the unit included a supercap along with the battery, or it had some sort of harvesting circuit—but those were unlikely in such a cheap, toss-away unit. Or I had found my path to fame and fortune, with an LED which was self-powered and needed no external source (infinite efficiency!), but that too was unlikely. Hmmm...maybe I was misinterpreting the situation? Then reality came, as I inadvertently moved my hand between my bench lamp and the remote control—and the LED went out. Long story short: that little LED was capturing and reflecting the illumination from the bench lamp, so it looked as if it was a light source, when it was not. Since the position and angle between the lamp and the LED was not changing, the LED was reflecting and thus "on" all the time. It was a simple optical effect, and the cleaned-up keys of the keypad were actually fine. The reason I didn't see the LED come on as each button was pushed was that the LED's internally reflected glow from the bench lamp was much stronger than the powered-on illumination of the LED; in effect, the LED's powered output was swamped by the reflection it was delivering (it's a variation of the theme of noisesignal). This is clearly a fairly trivial debug problem. While I assumed at first that it was a problem with the electronic circuitry, or mechanical buttons on the keypad, it was neither. Instead, it's another lesson for my learning-experience logbook, and fortunately it's a low-cost one. Have you ever had debug problems where the evidence and your assumptions proved to be way off from the reality? And how did you find out?

I've always believed that system-level debugging is one of the most difficult engineering challenges. It requires experience and mentoring (neither of which you'll get in school); the ability to think both outside and inside the box; the stamina to examine and re-examine all your assumptions, data, and tests; and use of multiple disciplines as you work through a problem that may involve one or more of circuitry, software, and mechanical functions. And then there those dumb but simple problems that turn out to not be problems at all, just a misreading of the observed symptoms. I recently had some intermittent buttons on the keypad of a TV remote control—one of those $10 universal ones you can buy anywhere. Sure, I could have just tossed it out, but that's no fun. I had opened this one before, and the problem was one I've seen on many such remotes, cordless phones, and similar units. They use a keypad assembly made of conductive elastomer dots which are supposed to complete a circuit on the PC board. In time, the dots start oozing some gunk as the dot material begins to decompose, and the gunk inhibits any low-resistance circuit closure through the dot. I have a two-phase repair process: first, I clean the dots and the associated PC board with alcohol or degreaser. If that doesn't work, I glue small circles of aluminum foil onto each elastomeric contact, so real metal is now closing the circuit, while the gunk can no longer interfere. Sure, it's a lot of work, but it is oh-so-satisfying. But this last go-round had me puzzled for a few minutes. Here's why: I had the remote control mounted in an angled vise—the kind you use when working on PC boards—so it wouldn't move around as I worked on it. I went through my usual cleaning steps, and was ready for a check of all the keys on the unit. This remote control has a tiny LED in the upper corner, which flashes whenever you push any button, which gives a nice bit of user feedback, and is also handy for checking that I cleaned all the keys. Wait a moment: the LED was on, even when no keys were depressed. I figured that one or more of the keys was stuck "on", so I checked the PC board for shorts, a stray filament of wire, anything. Everything seemed OK. So, I next took out the battery (in preparation for some continuity checks with the ohmmeter), and the LED stayed on even then. This meant one of several things: perhaps the unit included a supercap along with the battery, or it had some sort of harvesting circuit—but those were unlikely in such a cheap, toss-away unit. Or I had found my path to fame and fortune, with an LED which was self-powered and needed no external source (infinite efficiency!), but that too was unlikely. Hmmm...maybe I was misinterpreting the situation? Then reality came, as I inadvertently moved my hand between my bench lamp and the remote control—and the LED went out. Long story short: that little LED was capturing and reflecting the illumination from the bench lamp, so it looked as if it was a light source, when it was not. Since the position and angle between the lamp and the LED was not changing, the LED was reflecting and thus "on" all the time. It was a simple optical effect, and the cleaned-up keys of the keypad were actually fine. The reason I didn't see the LED come on as each button was pushed was that the LED's internally reflected glow from the bench lamp was much stronger than the powered-on illumination of the LED; in effect, the LED's powered output was swamped by the reflection it was delivering (it's a variation of the theme of noisesignal). This is clearly a fairly trivial debug problem. While I assumed at first that it was a problem with the electronic circuitry, or mechanical buttons on the keypad, it was neither. Instead, it's another lesson for my learning-experience logbook, and fortunately it's a low-cost one. Have you ever had debug problems where the evidence and your assumptions proved to be way off from the reality? And how did you find out?