Design and Implementation of ZigBee based URC Applicable to Legacy Home Appliances

There are many various CE (consumer electronics) home appliances being controlled and managed with each different remote control unit based on IR(Infra-Red) signal in our home environments. A universal remote control (URC) unit is an integrated device for controlling these various devices (with a single one). To control them based on IR control signal, the URC unit has to have many pre-programmed control codes for controlling them because each home appliance is controlled with each its identical IR control profile. In case of appliances from different vendors, the IR profile for two different CE devices may be represented with different format even though the type of these appliances is same, such as television sets. In this paper, we propose a novel ZigBee based URC, called Z-URC in this paper, applicable to multiple legacy home appliances. The proposed Z-URC controls dynamically multiple legacy IR controllable digital CE appliances based on IEEE802.15.4, especially ZigBee protocol. The proposed scheme consists of two main components; Z-URC(ZigBee based Universal Remote Control) and Z2IR(ZigBee to IR) conversion module. The one is an integrated remote control unit using ZigBee based wireless network technology, WPAN(wireless personal area network) and the other is a Z2IR(ZigBee to IR) conversion module which converts a control message transferred through the ZigBee network into an IR typed control signal. In the proposed scheme, the list of CE devices to be controlled by the proposed URC is dynamically reconfigured. It is based on his location as a consumer with the proposed Z-URC goes from a room to any other place in his house. The Z-URC gets some information for its controllable devices' product identifier (ID) and vendor ID from WPAN (wireless personnel area network) based on ZigBee. A user may configure the two IDs for his CE appliances. Based on this feature, the module informs the Z-URC a target appliance's information. And, we apply a novel mechanism to our proposed scheme to minimize power consumption of the Z2IR module, which is based on ZigBee devices' ON/OFF control mechanism using multiple timers.