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+---
+title: "Amp Automation"
+date: 2023-10-25T20:01:27-04:00
+tags: ["Shool Projects"]
+---
+
+My parents music amplifier had an idle timeout. To avoid
+having to turn it on manually, I configured a raspberry pi
+to send infrared signals which turned it on and set its input
+channel when a device would want to stream music.
+
+Whenever that Cambridge Amplifier was idle for 45 minutes, it automatically
+shut itself off to save power. The main issue with this design is that the
+amplifier could power two distinct zones. In the case of my parents, those
+zones were the living room and the kitchen. This meant that, since the
+amplifier itself was in the living room, whenever we wanted to stream music in
+the kitchen, we had to:
+
+1. Walk to the living room
+2. Turn on the amplifier an set it's zone to only the kitchen
+3. Pair the device that would stream music via bluetooth to it
+4. Walk back to the kitchen
+
+Doing this once or twice is fine, but having to do it daily quickly became tedious. So
+I decided to see what I could do to automate it. Back then, I already had a raspberry
+or 2 lying around so I took that as my starting point. The Cambridge came with a remote
+so I figured I could use infrared signals to control it. after a bit of digging, I found
+this precious little datasheet detailing the different IR codes which existed for the
+model of amplifier my parents had:
+
+![Cambridge CXA60 IR Datasheet](cambridge-cxa60-ir-codes.png)
+
+Another tool I discovered during my research was [shairport-sync][1]. It emulates
+an airport express which allowed me to stream my music directly to it instead of walking
+to the living room. Another great this this utility has are hooks. I could tell it to
+execute a command whenever music got started or stopped. I figured if my music was streaming
+through this, I could set a command to send IR signals whenever I started/stopped streaming
+music. To do this, I needed to do two things:
+
+- Make a small circuit for an infrared diode
+- Figure out a way to correctly send the IR code to the diode via a script
+
+Thankfully, hooking up a diode to a raspberry pi isn't all that hard. A transistor,
+a resistance, and a couple of wires and you're good to go. When it came to sending the signal,
+I discovered a beautiful little python package called [lirc][2] which can properly convert
+numeric codes into impulses that can be sent to the raspberry pi's GPIO pins.
+
+AND IT WORKED! All in all, this was quite a simple project. But getting to use it everyday,
+I must say it did feel quite gratifying and fun!
+
+[1]: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync
+[2]: https://lirc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/