Prologue

I recently moved in a new apartment in which the living room lights could be controlled with a remote. Having already played with IR signals in order to incorporate remote control to some of my projects I knew that I would probably be able to emulate the signals sent by the original remote and thus operate the lights of my living room from a web based application.

My first reflex was to think of using an Arduino with a wifi/ethernet shield. I could have used the ever usefull aRest library in order to build a REST api on the microcontroller. The web-app would have been hosted on a remote server and used as an graphical interface in order to make the right calls to the Arduino.

But this time I wanted to take a less low-level approach and it was a perfect opportunity to get my hands on a raspberry pi. With its computing and networking capabilities plus a direct control over the GPIO pins, the pi allows me to run the web-server and manage the IR signals from the same device. Furthermore I can use packages that will make my life so much easier, and use the full potential of the Pi to create a very complete hub for my domotics needs.
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