Wandering in embedded land: part 2, Arduino turned remote control
Now with the Midea AC remote control being mostly deciphered,
the next step is to emulate the remote, with an arduino since it's
the system I use for that embedded greenhouse control. While waiting
for my mail ordered IR LED (I didn't want to solder off one from my
existing AC controllers), I started doing a bit of code and looking
at the integration problems.
The hardware side
One of the challenge is that the Arduino system is already heavy
packed, basically I use all the digital Input/Output except 5 (and 0 and
1 which are hooked to the serial support), and 2 of the 6 analog inputs,
as the card already drives 2 SHT1x temp/humidity sensors, 2 light sensors,
an home made 8 way relay board, and a small LCD display, there isn't much
room left physically or in memory for more wires or code ! Fortunately
driving a LED requires minimal resources, the schematic is trivial:
I actually used a 220 Ohms resistance since I didn't had a 100 Ohms one,
the only effect is how far the signal may be received, really not a problem
in my case. Also I initially hooked it on pin 5 which shouldn't had been
a problem, and that's the free slot I have available on the Arduino
The software side
My thinking was: well I just need to recreate the same set of light
patterns to emulate the remote control and that's done, sounds fairly simple
and I started coding royines which would switch the led on or off for
1T, 3T and 4T durations. Thus the core of the code was like:
void emit_midea_start(void) {
ir_down(T_8);
ir_up(T_8);
}
void emit_midea_end(void) {
ir_down(T_1);
ir_up(T_8);
}
void emit_midea_byte(byte b) {
int i;
byte cur = b;
for (i = 0;i < 8;i++) {
ir_down(T_1);
if (cur & 1)
ir_up(T_3);
else
ir_up(T_1);
cur >>= 1;
}
cur = ~b;
for (i = 0;i < 8;i++) {
ir_down(T_1);
if (cur & 1)
ir_up(T_3);
else
ir_up(T_1);
cur >>= 1;
}
}
where ir_up() and ir_down() were respectively activating or deactivating
the pin 5 set as OUTPUT for the given duration defined as macros.
Playing with 2 arduinos simultaneously
Of course to test my code the simplest was to set up the new module on
another arduino positioned in front of the Arduino with the IR receptor
and running the same code as used for decoding the protocol.
The nice thing is that you can hook up the arduinos on 2 different USB
cables connected to the same machine, they will report as ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1
and once you have looked at the serial output you can find which is which.
The only cumbersome part is having to select the serial port to the other one
when you want to switch box either to monitor the output or to upload a new
ersion of the code, so far things are rather easy.
Except it just didn't worked !!!
Not the arduino, I actually replaced the IR LED by a normal one from
time to time to verify it was firing for a fraction of a second when
emitting the sequence, no the problem was that the IR receiver was detecting
transitions but none of the expected duration, or order, nothing I could
really consider a mapping of what my code was sending. So I tweaked
the emitting code over and over rewriting the timing routines in 3
different ways, trying to disable interrupts, etc... Nothing worked!
Clearly there was something I hadn't understood ... and I started
searching on google and reading, first about timing issues on the Arduino
but things ought to be correct there, and then on existing remote control
code for Arduino and others. Then I hit
Ken Shirriff's blog on his IR library for the Arduino and realized
that the IR LED and the IR Receiver don't operate at the same level. The
LED really can just be switched on or off, but the IR Receiver is calibrated
for a given frequency (38 KHz in this case) and will not report if it
gets the IR light, but report if it gets the 38 KHz pulse carried by
the IR light. In a nutshell the IR receiver was decoding my analogic 0's
but didn't for the 1's because it was failing to catch a 38 KHz pulse,
I was switching the IR led permanently on and that was not recognized as
a 1 and generating erroneous transitions.
Emitting the 38KHz pulse
Ken Shirriff has another great article titled
Secrets of Arduino PWM explaining the details used to generate a pulse automatically
on *selected* Arduino digital output ans explains the details used to set this
up. This is rather complex and nicely encapsulated in his infrared library
code, but I would suggest to have a look if you're starting advanced
developments on the Arduino.
The simplest is then to use Ken's
IRremote library
by first installing it into the installed arduino environment:
- create a new directory /usr/share/arduino/libraries/IRremote (as root)
- copy IRremote.cpp IRremote.hIRremote.h IRremoteInt.h there
and then use it in the midea_ir.ino program:
#include <IRremote.h>
IRsend irsend;
int IRpin = 3;
This includes the library in the resulting program, define an IRsend
object that we will use to drive the IR led. One thing to note is that
by default the IRremote library drives only the digital pin 3, you can
modify it to change to a couple of other pins, but it is not possible to
drive the PWM for digital pin 5 which is the one not used currently on
my greenhouse Arduino.
Then the idea is to just replace the ir_down() and ir_up() in the code
with the equivalent low level entry points driving the LED in the IRsend
object, first by using irsend.enableIROut(38) to enable the pulse at
38 KHz on the default pin (Digital 3) and then use irsend.mark(usec)
for the equivalent ir_down() and irsend.space(usec) for the ir_up():
void emit_midea_start(void) {
irsend.enableIROut(38);
irsend.mark(4200);
irsend.space(4500);
}
void emit_midea_end(void) {
irsend.mark(550);
irsend.space(4500);
}
void emit_midea_byte(byte b) {
int i;
byte cur = b;
byte mask = 0x80;
for (i = 0;i < 8;i++) {
irsend.mark(450);
if (cur & mask)
irsend.space(1700);
else
irsend.space(600);
mask >> 1;
}
...
Checking with a normal led allowed to spot a brief light when emitting
the frame so it was basically looking okay...
And this worked, placing the emitting arduino in front of the receiving
the IRanalyzer started to decode the frames, as with the real remote control,
things were looking good again !
But failed the real test ... when put in from of the AC the hardware didn't
react, some improvement is still needed.
Check your timings, theory vs. practice
I suspected some timing issue, not with the 38KHz pulse as the code from
Ken was working fine for an array of devices, but rather how my code was
emitting, another precious hint was found in the blog about the library:
IR sensors typically cause the mark to be measured as longer than expected and the space to be shorter than expected. The code extends marks by 100us to account for this (the value MARK_EXCESS). You may need to tweak the expected values or tolerances in this case.
remember that the receptor does some logic on the input to detect the
pulse at 38 KHz, that means that while a logic 0 can be detected relatively
quickly, it will take at least a few beats before the sync to the pulse is
recognized and the receiver switch its output to a logic 1. In a nutshell
a 1 T low duration takes less time to recognize than an 1 T high duration.
I was also afraid that the overall time to send a full frame would drift
over the fixed limit needed to transmit it.
So I tweaked the emitting code to count the actual overall duration of
the frames, and aslo added to the receiver decoding code the display of the
duration of the first 10 durations between transitions. I then reran the
receiver looking at the same input from the real remote control and the
arduino emulation, and found that in average:
- the emulated 8T down was 200us too long
- the emulated 8T up was 100us too short
- the emulated 1T down at the beginning of a bit was 100us too long
- the emulated 1T up at the end of logical 0 was 80us too short
- the emulated 3T up at the end of logical 1 was 50us too short
After tweaking the duration accordingly in the emitter code, I got
my first successful emulated command to the AC, properly switching it off,
SUCCESS !!!
I then finished the code to provide the weird temperature conversions
front end routines and then glue that as a test application looping over
a minute:
- switching to cooling to 23C for 15s
- switching to heating to 26C for 15s
- switching the AC off for 30s
The midea_ir_v1.ino code
is available for download, analysis and reuse. I would suggest to not
let this run for long in fron of an AC as the very frequent change of mode
may not be good for the hardware (nor for the electricity bill !).
Generating the 38KHz pulse in software
While the PWM generation has a number of advantages, especially w.r.t.
regularity of the pattern and no risk of drift due for example to delays
handling interrupts, in my case it has the serious drawback of forcing use
of a given pin (3 by default, or 9 if switching to a different timer in the
IRremote code), and those are not available, unless getting the soldering
iron and changing some of the existing routing in my add-on board. So
the next step is to also implement the 38KHz pulse in software. First
this should only affect the up phase, the down phase consist of no emission
and hence implemented by a simple:
void send_space(int us) {
digitalWrite(IRpin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(us);
}
The up part should divised into HIGH for most of the duration, followed
by a small LOW indicating the pulse. 38 KHz means a 26.316 microseconds
period. Since the delayMicroseconds() of the arduino indicates it can be
reliable only for more than 3 microseconds, it seems reasonable to use
a 22us HIGH/ 4us LOW split, and expect the remaining computation to fill
the sub-microsecond of the period, that ought to be accurate enough. One
of the point of the code below is to try to avoid excessive drift in two
ways:
- by doing the accounting over the total lenght for the up period,
not trying to just stack 21 periods - by running a busy loop when the delay left is minimal rather than
call delayMicroseconds() for a too small amount (not sure it's effective
micros() value seems periodically updated by an timer interrupt handler
doesn't look like the chip provides a fine grained counter).
The resulting code doesn't look very nice:
void send_mark(int us) {
unsigned long e, t = micros();
e = t + us;
while (t < e) {
digitalWrite(IRpin, HIGH);
if (t - e < 4) {
while ((t = micros()) < e);
digitalWrite(IRpin, LOW);
break;
}
if (t - e < 22) {
delayMicroseconds(t-e);
digitalWrite(IRpin, LOW);
break;
}
delayMicroseconds(22);
digitalWrite(IRpin, LOW);
t = micros();
if (t - e < 4) {
while ((t = micros()) < e);
break;
}
delayMicroseconds(4);
t = micros();
}
}
But to my surprize once I replaced all the irsend.mark() and irsend.space()
by equivalent calls to send_mark() and send_space(), the IRanalyzer running on
the second arduino properly understood the sequence, proving that the IR
receiver properly picked the signal, yay !
Of course that didn't worked out the first time on the real hardware,
after a bit of analysis of the resulting timings exposed by IRanalyzer
I noticed the mark at the beginning of bits were all nearly 100us too long,
I switched the generation from 450us to 350us, and bingo, that worked with the
real aircon !
the midea_ir_v2.ino resulting module
is very specific code, but it is tiny, less than 200
lines, and he hardware side is also really minimal, a single resistor and
the IR led.
Epilogue
The code is now plugged and working, but v2 just could not work in the
real environment with all the other sensors and communication going on.
I suspect that the amount of foreign interrupts are breaking the 38KHz
pulse generation, switching back to the PWM generated pulse using the
IRremote library works in a very reliable way. So I had to unsolder pin 3
and reaffect it to the IR led, but that was a small price to pay in
comparison of trying to debug the timing issues in situ !
The next step in the embedded work will be to replace the aging NSLU2
driving the arduino by a shiny new Raspberry Pi !
This entry will be kept at http://veillard.com/embedded/midea.html.
