Take advantage of activity-based control, customizable button layouts, multi-touch and motion gestures on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to interact with your gear from up to 30 feet away.
Complete with its own carrying case, RedEye mini is made for home or travel. No batteries required — RedEye mini plugs into your phone’s headphone jack, leaving the charging connector open.
Get the advanced features at a fraction of the price of other advanced remotes. Bundled with an interactive channel guide and extensive IR code database at no additional cost.
By itself, your iPhone does not have the ability to send out the infrared signals used to control most home theater equipment. RedEye mini fills that gap. It runs off of the power your phone delivers through the headphone jack, so RedEye mini is completely portable, requires no batteries, and never needs recharging. Download the RedEye iPhone application, plug in your RedEye mini, and you are ready to go. RedEye mini works with the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th generation iPod touch, iPhone 3G/3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad.
iTunes is for legal or rightholder-authorized copying only. Don’t steal music. Apple is not responsible for the operation of this device or its compliance with safety and regulatory standards. Apple, the Apple logo, iPod, and iTunes are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc.
* iPhone/iPod not included *
ThinkFlood, the ThinkFlood logo, RedEye, the RedEye logo, and the RedEye stylized “R” logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of ThinkFlood, Inc.
Virtually all home entertainment devices with infrared capabilities. (Infrared transmission and learning between 20kHz and 60kHz.)
Device Compatibility
iPod touch (2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations)
iPhone 3G/3GS
iPhone 4
iPad
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How Does It Work?
Please excuse us for a minute while we geek out a bit about RedEye mini.
More Than Just Audio Files and an LED
From the time that we announced the RedEye mini there has been a lot of speculation as to how it works, with the most popular assumption being that we stuck an infrared LED or two on the end of a headphone jack and play audio files to make the LED flash. While it is possible to fashion a remote control of sorts in this manner, there are some fundamental limits to this approach:
Audio files can approximate infrared control signals well enough to control many but not all common home theater devices.
Transmission range using only the power of the headphone jack in this manner is relatively short.
In other words, while it is possible to create a rudimentary infrared adapter using just a headphone jack, a couple of LEDs, and some software, the results are less than satisfying and far from “universal.” In order to make the RedEye mini a viable commercial product, we had to come up with an alternative approach to overcoming these issues.
A Tiny Modem
The first thing we tackled was the problem of faithfully reproducing infrared signals to control most any home theater device on the market. With very few exceptions, infrared remote controls use carrier frequencies between 20kHz and 60kHz, with the majority operating at around 38kHz. By contrast, audio playback through the headphone jack of a modern MP3 player tops out at around 20kHz. Although that may seem good enough, the Nyquist theorem states that in order to faithfully capture and reproduce a signal we need to operate at more than twice the frequency — or 40kHz to 120kHz. Since these frequencies are beyond the capability of the headphone jack, we needed to find another solution.
In order to reproduce these higher frequencies, we put a microprocessor into the RedEye mini. The mini’s microprocessor has no problems keeping up with normal infrared control frequencies, but the question was how to tell the microprocessor what signals to send. To accomplish this we turned the headphone jack into a small modem. We can send signals up to the mini’s processor through the left and right channels, and the processor can respond over the microphone line. Thankfully iOS gives us fine-grained control over audio playback and recording so we didn’t have to worry about keeping up on that side.
Power Harvesting
Quick: what do hybrid cars, tidal power turbines, and RedEye mini have in common? The answer is that all three use a technique called power harvesting to capture and store energy. Hybrid cars harvest power from braking, tidal power turbines harvest power from the tides, and RedEye mini harvests power from the communication signals sent over the headphone jack modem. We use some of this power to run the microprocessor, but most of it is stored in a pair of rather large capacitors that act like small batteries to give RedEye mini that extra kick when transmitting an infrared signal. By tuning the frequency at which the modem operates, the size of the capacitors, and the way we pulse the LED, we were able to give RedEye mini a substantial range boost over what we could get from the headphone jack alone.
What does all this mean for you? Simply that a lot of engineering went into RedEye mini so that you can get the most out of it.
Software
RedEye is much more than a simple infrared adapter for your phone, and software plays a key role. At ThinkFlood we develop our software in-house and strive to provide regular updates and improvements. Here are some of the things that we feel set our software apart from the crowd:
Activity-based approach
We believe your home theater should be organized around what you do, not what hardware manufacturers produce. One touch to play a movie, touch again to watch TV — no more trying to remember which audio and video inputs you need.
Smart actions
Many other remotes have “macro” capability (the option to have one button send two or more signals). RedEye goes beyond macros with smart actions that actually keep track of things like whether a device is on or off. Smart actions are particularly useful when switching activities — when you transition from watching TV to playing a DVD, RedEye is smart enough to leave the TV on.
Customizable button layouts
RedEye gives you a unique button layout for each activity you create, so the “remote” you use when listening to music is different from the one you use when watching TV. You can customize everything from button placement to size. We even have hundreds of channel logos built right into the application.
Activity templates
Customizable button layouts for each activity are great, but creating them from scratch can be a lot of work. When you create a new activity, RedEye starts you off with a well-designed template. And by template we don’t mean a single, standard set of buttons. Instead, RedEye uses information like the activity type (Watch TV or Listen to Music?) and the devices you include in the activity (do you route your sound through an A/V receiver or your TV speakers?) to determine what buttons to include and how they should function.
Macro and toggle buttons
In addition to the usual tap or tap-and-hold functionality you expect, it is easy to make RedEye activity buttons perform more advanced functions. Macro buttons can send out multiple commands — for example, a smart mute button that turns on closed captioning when turning off the volume. Toggle buttons can switch between different functions each time you press them, like the classic play/pause button on a CD or MP3 player.
Shortcut gestures
Touchscreens are great because they provide the ultimate flexibility — custom layouts for each activity being one example. However, they can make it harder to tap the right button when you are channel surfing or otherwise need to be looking elsewhere. RedEye uses the full functionality of the iPhone — multitouch and the accelerometer — to overcome this limitation. Choose from any of five motion gestures or eighteen multi-touch gestures for any button in your activity layout.
Customizable delays
When executing a series of actions — for example during the launch of an activity — it is important to be able to fine-tune the delay between commands. RedEye allows you to insert delays of up to 20 seconds in 0.05 second increments.
Quick launch
You want to be able to pick up your remote control and use it right away. If your remote is an app on your phone, then it has to launch fast and put you in the driver’s seat immediately. RedEye is optimized to launch quickly and to bring you right to the activity in progress. And now if you are using iOS 4 on a device that supports multi-tasking it’s even faster than before.
Online infrared code database
Sure, RedEye can learn commands from your existing remote controls, but who wants to do that? Our software is backed by an online database of more than 45,000 infrared codes covering over 1,200 device manufacturers, so there’s a good chance we have what you need. And because the database is stored on a web server rather than on your phone or the RedEye hardware, you get updates to the database as soon as they are available — no need to wait for the next software release.
Integrated channel guide
The RedEye app includes an television channel guide covering cable, satellite, and over-the-air broadcasts in the United States and Canada. With the channel guide you no longer need to take up the space on your main screen while you decide what to watch next. It is also easy to filter the list based on your favorite channels so that you don’t have to scroll through dozens of screens just to find what you want.
Toolbar hiding
The iPhone screen is pretty big, but sometimes you want to get everything out of the way and focus on your remote control. RedEye gives you a few different options to remove clutter and take control.
Disabling the sleep timer
The iPhone’s built in sleep-timer helps you conserve battery, and so you want to leave it on in most cases. However, when you are sitting down within arm’s reach of a charging cradle, you might prefer to keep the phone awake. A simple setting in the RedEye app allows you to disable the sleep timer while the application is running without disabling it for all applications.
Multitasking
Beginning with version 1.2.0, RedEye fully supports iOS 4 multitasking, which means that you can get back to controlling your activities even faster than before.
Retina display support
RedEye now provides high resolution button images so that everything looks crisp and clear on your new iPhone 4.
Full-screen iPad support
The RedEye app now runs full screen on both iPhone and iPad. On your iPad, RedEye works in both landscape and portrait orientations, and offers full support for multi-tasking. In landscape orientation, you can preview a full hour of TV programming information right alongside your current activity controls.
Getting Started with RedEye mini
From unboxing to controlling your home theater, configuration and setup of the RedEye system takes about 15-20 minutes. This video takes you through the basic steps so that you can be up and running quickly.
Of course there is much more to the RedEye system than what you see here. For more information, please check out the RedEye User Manual, or read about our recent software releases.
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