Let'em hear

February 09, 2004

If you are a consumer electronic geek this will probably bore you since RF technology is old news. However, RF provided such a cool solution to a petty and annoying problem that I will write about it anyway.

I am by no means a neat freak but I am sure that like me, many of you are frustrated with the seemingly growing visual clutter created by electronic devices piling up next to your television set. I finally reached the point when I decided to do something about it by putting the DVD player, VCR, Tivo, and Audio Receiver out of sight to just leave the TV in plain view. Problem is that once the devices are put away, their remote controls stop working. The reason is that in general electronic devices rely on Infrared (IR) light beams to enable your device to receive instructions from their remotes, in other words a remote control and its corresponding electronic device have to literally "see" each other in order to work.

Enter RF technology, which relies on radio waves traveling through the air. Instead of the devices having to "see" each other, they only have to "hear" each other. Using RF you may hide your DVD player under your bed if you ever feel the need, and its remote will still work. So how do you go about incorporating such cool technology to your existing gadgets without having to replace them all? Buy an RF converter available at any Radio shack, which will convert the signals of any remote into radio waves. In the end, you'll have your living room looking like a snapshot from the 50's when TVs used to sit alone in living rooms without any competition from any additional garbage around them.

Links
Beautiful design work at the Phantom Research Foundation, link courtesy of my good friend Chris who by the way happens to have a lovely site at winnerssociety