Development of an autonomous and generic remote control scheme

Due to the progress of information technologies, traditional information appliances (IAs) further evolve. IAs enter everyone´s home with competitive prices, friendly control interfaces, and wireless networks. Accompanied with the increasing variety and functions of IAs, more and more remote controllers are created and this makes the controller an inseparable part to the associated IA. But such many controllers subjected to different IAs make the operation difficult since you have to switch from one controller to another when you want to operate different IAs. Although, there are some configurable controllers on the markets they must be adjusted with the channels of the subjected IAs before use. In this work, the autonomous and generic remote control scheme is proposed to serve as the remote control mechanism between controllers and IAs. This generic remote controller (GRC) can automatically detect a controlled device and dynamically download the context information from the controlled device. As such, users can conveniently control different IAs without prior configuring the GRC. The infrared, IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN, and Java RMI technologies are first utilized to develop the prototype of GRC. Further, we develop another powerful prototype, which utilizes Bluetooth interface with service discovery protocol (SDP), RFComm protocol, and embedded system technology. As such, the infrastructure and feasibility of this scheme are verified We believe, in the near future, the proposed scheme can be evolved into a practical development platform applied in various devices, such as IAs, production machines, medical instruments, etc., so as to improve the quality of human life.