Helping video projectors to behave

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My friend, artist, and colleague was planning an Arts exhibit and asked me a simple question: How can I best [automatically] switch off some video projectors I am using?

After some experience, I have come to realize that Interactive Art projects have the additional complexity of day-to-day starting and stopping. Most places have staff who can take care of operating an electric switch or a remote control, but anything more complex than that and you are in trouble and the success of your project may be jeopardized by improper setup. So it is the best interest of the artist to streamline the process as much as possible.

It is really not a problem to ask the staff to switch on an Arts installation using a remote control but, if you want your piece to shut down by itself you may need some convincing. What is really a bad idea, and unfortunately I am witnessing this with all kinds of equipment on campus, is to just remove power from the device you want to switch off. The reason is that many devices, from computers to video projectors to AC units require a specific shutdown sequence to make sure no damage is done.

Most video projectors will warn you against shutting them down by removing power. If you chose to ignore the warning you may quickly get in trouble (short light bubble lifespan and these are expensive). So what do you do for shutting them down automatically? My proposal is to transmit the same infrared signal the remote sends for powering it on and off using an Arduino. You can program the Arduino so it can power the video projector on and off when you see fit, making the human intervention unnecessary once installed.

But if you want an Arduino to transmit the "power on/off" code,  the first thing you need is to figure out what is the code the remote is sending. To do that an IR receiver is needed. The one I used is the TSOP4838, that works well with 38Khz IR remotes.


I have used IRLib2 with that TSOP4838 receiver, just plugged in on an Arduino UNO board and it worked flawlessly as the picture above shows (I just used the dump example that came with the library using pin 2 as data input). Like many other remotes, mine uses NEC format and the power button spits out code 0x8C73817E. Half of the work is done now.

Once you know the code you want to send, you can use the same library for sending purposes. By default digital pin 3 will be used for output. Depending on the distance you want to cover you can get away with powering the IR LED from the Arduino pin or not. Most of the time you want to cover a decent range and to achieve that you will use a transistor to boost the current on your LED to 50 or 100mA (depending on the specs of your LED). Some people do not even use a current limiting resistor in series with the IR LED as they claim the current pulses are so short and infrequent that the LED will not be damaged and emitted power is peaked this way. I just used a BD137 bipolar transistor and 100-ohm resistor in series with my IR LED.  Have a look at the rawSend example from the library to learn how to transmit an IR code.

Most of our video projection units require pressing the power button twice to power them down. After some experimentation, I settled on a 3-second pause in between the two transmissions (as longer or shorter pauses would make my attempt not to power down the projector). 

A detailed explanation of IR communications with Arduino can be found on this excellent video by Andreas Spiess.

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