B&O IR gateway

[IR_peter]

Hi all,

I had been a B&O fan in the past, and part of BeoWorld many years ago… But just came back now after many years….

For one of my projects, I am considering creating a B&O IR gateway (ie get 455 KHz IR commands from BROne IR/Beo4/Essence Remote IR, and convert them to web APIs/MQTT, etc). I looked around and did not find anything solid (there used to be the Lintronic in the past, but I dont see it being available anymore.

I was wondering, are there any interesting use cases, scenarios that this forum would see a need for such a gateway? Or other relevant functionalities for solving real world problems out there?

(IR is the need I have, it could as well be BT).

Happy to hear your thoughts… What problems do you have, and how have you solved them, in this domain? Thanks

Peter

Location: Denmark

[TK]

There’s a nice project on GitHub called Beomote which is along similar lines to what you are looking to do, and might help get you started.

As to potential hurdles, if you are only looking to do one-way stateless with a URL callable interface (for example), your life will be much simpler.  A 2-way application will need to remember some semblance of system “state”, and occasionally have to sync its internal state condition with whatever system its controlling.  B&O provided a “status” query in the early 2-way protocols, which makes things a bit more manageable, but the entire “state” of the Beomaster is not queryable all at once, so you have to keep careful track of the sporadic incoming status messages to keep track of where things stand.  Something to consider during design.

For fun, I’m working on a project I call BeoBabble which facilitates 2-way comms between the early pre-Masterlink units, and runs on an Arduino.  I had to shelve it for a while as it was taking up a bunch of time, but I plan to dust if off in a few weeks time when things calm down.  At some point I’ll add an IR interface, because it appears to be the same decode/encode pattern from what I can see, but that interface won’t be available for a while. I only mention it here because Beo4 is straight Datalink ’86 in it’s most basic form, which is one of the early protocols BeoBabble supports.   If I can be of any assistance in that specific arena, I’m happy to help.

 

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