Patent Application
20060049958
The present invention relates to wireless control devices, and more particularly, to a remote controller that allows a user through an interface connection to directly access internal control data from a device to be controlled.
As the electronic technology and fabrication technique advance, various electric appliances designated with multimedia and multi-functionality have been provided. In order to comply with users' or consumers' operational habits, manufacturers have focused on developing humanized operation interface such as multi-linguistic operation interface, patterned selection interface, or sound operation indication functions, etc.
Besides the humanized operation interface or other additional functions, most of the manufacturers also provide a remote-control function for their products for sale so as to allow the users or consumers to benefit by the advanced technology. Such function further plays an important role for most of the users in determining if to purchase the products.
In fact, due to strong competition among the manufacturers and continuous changes of the users' expenditure trends, the manufacturers need to keep developing new functions for the products to bring forth the new and maintain their products on the market not out of date.
However, since the products made by different manufacturers have dedicated remote controllers thereof, and a single manufacturer provides various electric appliances with different specifications and functions, there result in plenty of various kinds of products having different specifications and functions for sale on the market. Even the electric appliances having the same use may be made with diverse specifications. For example of television, if a user has a television made by manufacture A, its remote controller from manufacture A normally does not work to control a television made by manufacture B. Moreover, since many electric appliances are currently used in a home such as television, air conditioner, DVD player, CD hi-fi, etc. each provided with a dedicated remote controller, this situation would confuse and cause inconvenience to the user, for example, using a wrong remote controller to operate the electric appliance or easily losing any of the remote controllers.
In light of the above problems, there have been disclosed the following solutions. Firstly, a code input method is to input control data of products from various manufacturers that are relatively more commonly used to a single remote controller, such that the user can input a code of the product to be controlled to the remote controller every time so as to record and operate the product. Secondly, a semi-automatic scanning method is to aim a remote controller at an electric appliance to be controlled and to consecutively press the On/Off button of the remote controller to output different frequency signals until the electric appliance generates a responsive On/Off action so as to record and operate the electric appliance. However, the above two methods not only require long time to obtain the responsive frequency but also are not suitable for all remote controllers from different manufacturers. In other words, since the same manufacturer may have a plurality of codes, it thus complicates the setting process and causes inconvenience in searching, and also an operation panel of the remote controller should be added with many switch buttons for more manufacturer specifications. In light of these drawbacks, Taiwanese Patent No. 558035 (“TW 558035” hereinafter) discloses a multi-functional remote controller for rapidly automatic code search, which is provided with a central processor in a control circuit, the central processor comprising a plurality of memory devices for recording frequencies corresponding to all electric appliances and all manufacturers; twenty-six English letters of A, B, . . . , Y and Z are used to indicate the manufacturers at different areas in the world to establish different code tables of effective combinations for local use; the main memory and the second memory in the central processor respectively record search addresses and codes of various products from all manufacturers and address tags represented by the twenty-six English letters for all the manufacturers to classify and store such huge amount of data, such that the searching speed can be greatly increased and the operating time would be reduced. Therefore, TW 558035 employs a relatively more regular arrangement manner to store the corresponding remote-control frequencies of electric appliances from various manufacturers in the remote controller so as to overcome the prior-art drawback of difficulty in searching the control frequency and thereby raise the code-searching speed. However, TW 558035 still has a drawback that it lacks flexibility in use as not able to be updated with the types of appliances. In other words, if the control frequencies of future-developed electric appliances are not collected in the remote controller, these electric appliances cannot be operated using the remote controller; thus, there is no real-time updating method for the remote controller to obtain the latest control frequencies. Therefore, the problem to be solved here is to provide a remote controller suitable for all digital electric appliances and capable of updating control frequencies in real time.
In light of the above drawbacks in the prior art, an objective of the present invention is to provide a remote controller that can be electrically connected via a connection interface to a digital electric appliance to be remotely controlled so as to read control data from the electric appliance, without causing any problem of compatibility between the remote controller and the electric appliance.
Another objective of the present invention is to provide a remote controller that can update control data stored therein by a connection to a digital electric appliance via a connection interface so as to quickly obtain a remote-control frequency of the electric appliance.
In order to achieve the above and other objectives, the present invention proposes a remote controller comprising: (1) a connection interface for being connected to a digital electric appliance so as to read internal control data from the electric appliance; (2) an input means acting as an operation interface for a user to remotely operate the electric appliance to execute functions; (3) a control unit for recognizing the control data read via the connection interface and generating a control signal according to an operational instruction input through the input means, the control unit further comprising a USB control module, a memory module, and a recognizing module installed with recognition software; and (4) a remote signal output unit for outputting a control command to the electric appliance corresponding to the control signal generated from the control unit.
The present invention can be more fully understood by reading the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments, with reference made to the accompanying drawing, wherein:
In the following preferred embodiment of the present invention, a proposed remote controller is described in accompany with a notebook computer for controlling operation of the notebook computer. However, it should be noted that the remote controller is not limited to the use with the notebook. More specifically, the remote controller in the present invention can be applied to any digital electric appliance having a Universal Serial Bus (USB) slot, such as desktop computer, television, etc.
Similarly, to operate any other digital electric appliances having USB slots via the remote controller 2, the above processes can be simply repeated that first the connection interface 20 is inserted to the digital electric appliance to establish an electrical connection and read control data from the digital electric appliance. The recognition software transforms the obtained control data into control information corresponding to the digital electric appliance and stores the control information in the memory module 210. Moreover, to operate digital electric appliances with different uses via the remote controller 2, a switch key (not shown) provided in the input means 22 can be actuated to switch the operations between the different digital electric appliances e.g. a television and studio appliances.
The development of electric appliances is increasingly incorporated with the digital technology to render computer data compatible with the electric appliances such that the electric appliances can provide more humanized operational functions as the computer does. Currently popular liquid crystal television and plasma television are successful examples of digital household appliances. In order to be compatible with digital video cameras or digital photo cameras, the liquid crystal television and the plasma television can be further provided with connection interface slots of various specifications, such as IEEE 1394, USB, and various memory card slots, etc. Thereby, photos taken by the digital camera can be displayed on the liquid crystal television or the plasma television. In case the electric appliance is to be used in accompany with the computer, the electric appliance must have a connection interface slot compatible with the computer and have the relevant software and hardware to perform data interchange with the computer or to be controlled by the computer to allow mutual integration. Therefore, the remote controller in the present invention is electrically connected to the digital electric appliance via the connection interface (such as USB) to quickly accesses the control data from the digital electric appliance, so as to remotely control and operate functions of the digital electric appliance.
The invention has been described using the exemplary preferred embodiment. However, it is to be understood that the scope of the invention is not limited to the disclosed embodiment. On the contrary, it is intended to cover various modifications and similar arrangements. The scope of the claims, therefore, should be accorded the broadest interpretation so as to encompass all such modifications and similar arrangements.
