Strav's blog

I have a number of WiFi to IR "blasters" in the house (Z-Motes).  They work, but they aren't super cheap (actually not too bad but they are shipped from India I believe so the shipping plus the base cost adds up).  I would like a cheaper alternative as I have additional locations I would like to deploy these units.  I recently found an article on adding a D1 Mini and IR Shield to a TV to allow it to be controlled remotely from HTTP calls.  I initially looked into the Arduino software from this project, acquired some D1 Minis and IR Shields as well as ordered some NodeMCU circuit boards with multiple IR emitters.  Ultimately, the width of the IR beam wasn't wide enough to be suitable, but I continued to search for a good enclosure in any case.  I ended up finding an IR Blaster on eBay, intending on gutting it and just using the case for my own board, however, when it showed up, it turns out that the IR Blaster was based on an ESP8266 chip which I was able to flash with the open source IR software I had settled on.  This provided for an extremely cost effective and very powerful device.  The following links are all the related IR sites I discovered as I worked through this project.

Controlling Devices With IR Remote!
ESP8266-MQTT-IR-Blaster
ESP8266-HTTP-IR-Blaster
ESP8266 IR blaster
ESP8266 NodeMCU
IR Controller Tutorial
Super-bright 5mm IR LED - 940nm
N-channel power MOSFET - 30V / 60A
Internet of Things Infrared Remote
Built-in MQTT IR remote
Building WiFi IR remote control for any TV with ESP8266 Wemos D1 mini and ESPHome
IR code reader with ESP8266 Wemos D1 mini and ESPHome