Turn any IR remote device in BT Smartphone remote

Tutorials and Guides
1

There are cheap IR receiver/sender modules with UART interface: YS-IRTM.

Basically they are extensions for arduinos etc but since they have a standard uart Rx/Tx you can connect them to a bluetooth-to-uart and talk IR directly from appinventor - without any additional microcontroller in between

first step is to read out original remote commands - here the straight forward way is a BT terminal program - you get 3 HEX Blocks - e.g. 00 FF 56 which is the command of one button.

For sending there is a little trap and i guess many got stuck there - it is not enough to just write the command from the original remote to the serial of the YS-IRTM - every command has to start with A1 F1 - followed by the actual command...

in the end the whole block in appinventor looks like this - just the onboard BT client - no extensions etc:

image

2

You can also use the USB/UART adapter and this extension: Using serial with FTDI everything can be powered from the phone's USB port.

Unless I missed something and the Serial component has already been fixed, then the extension will not be needed.

3

jep works same way - reduces effort on power supply side but u have to plug it in so depending on application and preferences (y)