[Colin Bookman] lives in a Fraternity house and apparently the remote for the cable television box has a way of walking off. He figured out a method to give everyone control of the TV channel in one form or another.
The cable television box can be seen perched on that shelf, and [Colin’s] addition is the wooden box sitting on the floor. inside is an Arduino board, and the cable television snaking out of the enclosure is an IR LED. This give the Arduino the ability to send remote control commands to the TV box. The two arcade buttons on the front will switch the channel up or down.
But this is hardly a remote control replacement because you have to get up to use it, so he went a few steps further. The Arduino board was paired with an Ethernet shield. It serves up a web page that has a virtual keypad. So anybody with a smart phone or laptop can log into the server and start changing the channels. We’re not sure if this offers relief from a missing remote, or promotes impromptu fist fights when brothers can’t agree on what to watch. It certainly opens up the possibility of long-distance trolling as you could be sitting in class and decide to change the channel to lifetime every ten minutes or so.
If you don’t have an Ethernet shield useful we’ve seen a similar setup that uses Bluetooth instead the network.