My father recently picked up a vacuem system for his woodshop. It is second hand, and looks very nice, it comes with an air filter also. How it works however is their is a plug that goes into a standard 120v wall outlet and it has a box on it that you plug the vacuem to. Now this box is just a relay, a circut breaker, and a RF recever. It should have a remote to go with it, but one of the fun things about getting second hand stuff is that you don't always get everything.
Now I'm not good at RF, yet. I just don't have the equipment for that kind of freqency, but what I can do is IR. (Infra-Red) Now this was fun because I got to tear open this box and modify a pre-existing circut. After opening it up I studyed the circut a bit and was able break it up into 3 main parts: the Relay itself, a 5v regulated power supply, and a RF recever circut.
For this hack I just disconnect the RF circut, build my own IR circut and attach it to the supplied 5v line. I will be using an attiny13a microcontoller atached to an IR recver to decode IR codes, and then toggle a pin attached to the relay turning the vacume on and off.
To start with I built the circut on an Arduino and just had it watch for any IR activity to turn a lamp on and off. After mking sure the proof of concept worked I set out to remake it using the attiny and an old TV remote. My plan is to be able to set up timer using the remotes number buttons.
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