Once Control Center is set-up, your TV-watching experience will be seamless and simple. We appreciate your patience in investing the time to properly set up Control Center. In most cases set up will take between minutes. If you need assistance during setup, we offer white glove installation options and our customer service team is here 7 days a week from 7am pm CST to help.
Watch With Friends, our free iOS and Android app, is just the ticket to alleviate your watch party hosting headaches, and our new Auto-Start feature makes hosting easier than ever.
All you have to do is pre-select a date and showtime for your watch party, and Watch With Friends will automatically start the show for you. Works With. Senior Living. Unlike your original remote which only controlled one device say an AppleTV, Roku, Cable box, or Soundbar , a universal remote allows you to control different brands and different types of devices all with the same remote control.
Will I ever need to use my original remote? In most cases, no. Let's look inside and see how they work. Here is the remote we will be dissecting today:. The remote control's job is to wait for you to press a key, and then to translate that key-press into infrared pronounced "infra-red" light signals that are received by the TV.
When you take off the back cover of the control you can see that there is really just 1 part visible: a printed circuit board that contains the electronics and the battery contacts. You can see an integrated circuit also known as a chip labeled "TA". To the right of the chip you can see a diode, a transistor black, with three leads , a resonator yellow , two resistors green and a capacitor dark blue.
Next to the battery contacts there is a resistor green and a capacitor tan disk. In this circuit, the chip can detect when a key is pressed. It then translates the key into a sequence something like morse code, with a different sequence for each different key. The chip sends that signal out to the transistor to amplify the signal and make it stronger. When you unscrew the circuit board and take it out, you can see that the circuit board is a thin piece of fiber glass that has thin copper "wires" etched onto its surface.
Electronic parts are assembled on printed circuit boards because they are easy to mass produce and assemble. In the same way that it is relatively inexpensive to print ink onto a sheet of paper, it is inexensive to "print" copper wires onto a sheet of fiber glass. It is also easy to have a machine drop the parts the chips, transistors, etc.
When you look at the board, you can see a set of contact points for the buttons. The buttons themselves are made of a thin rubbery sheet. For each button there is a black conductive disk. When the disk touches the contacts on the printed circuit board, it connects them and the chip can sense that connection.
You can think of an LED as a small light bulb. Eventually, scientists would figure out how to incorporate that technology into all sorts of electronic devices.
Today, remote control devices are usually based upon one of two main types of technology: infrared IR technology or radio frequency RF technology. Let's look at how these types of technology help you control devices from afar. When it comes to televisions and home theater devices, the dominant technology tends to be infrared.
An IR remote also called a transmitter uses light to carry signals from the remote to the device it controls. It emits pulses of invisible infrared light that correspond to specific binary codes. These codes represent commands, such as power on, volume up, or channel down. The controlled device also called the receiver decodes the infrared pulses of light into binary code that its internal microprocessor understands. Once the signal is decoded, the microprocessor executes the commands.
IR remotes use LED lights to transmit their infrared signals. This results in a few limitations of the technology. Since light is used to transmit the signal, IR remotes require line-of-sight, which means you need an open path between the transmitter and receiver.
This means that IR remotes won't work through walls or around corners. They also have a limited range of about 30 feet. Radio-frequency remotes work in a similar way.
Instead of using infrared light, though, they transmit binary codes to a receiver via radio waves. This gives RF remotes a much greater range than IR remotes. RF remotes can work at distances of feet or more. This makes them useful in applications such as garage door openers and car alarms. You can also now find RF remotes being used with some modern satellite television systems. RF remotes aren't without their own issues, however.
Although range is greatly improved compared to IR remotes, interference can be an issue for RF remotes due to the large number of radio waves all around us nearly all the time. For example, wireless internet and cell phones both use radio signals.
To get around the issue of interference, many RF remotes only transmit at specific frequencies. They can also embed digital address codes in the radio signals to ensure that a receiver only responds to the correct radio signals.
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