Wifi control of Tascam Reel to Reel tape machine

HI Everybody,

I have a beautiful vintage Tascam reel to reel tape recorder that I record music with.
I would like to be able to control it over a wireless network, using a laptop or even better, a tablet or smart phone.
The functions are very very basic: play, record, stop fast forward, rewind. Thats all.
It has a very simple remote control setup. 5v is applied to to the respective function pins to enable them, and when the button is unselected, the voltage removed. Not much more to it than that.

Can anybody point me in the direction of the tutorials and/or examples I need to study to teach myself to do this?

Regards
Gareth

The electrical side seems straight forward. You should be able to replace those manual switched with a small transistor controlled by the Arduino. There's a section of the forum dedicated to that type of problem.

There is a wide variety of wireless options available to you. If you want to use a tablet/phone as the user interface and have a home WiFi network then an Arduino with a WiFi shield would seem a good approach to take.You could host a web site on the Arduino which presents a page with buttons for each command, so that tapping the button submits an HTTP request to start the corresponding command. There are plenty of examples showing how to control an Arduino via a web page. One issue is that web pages don't really lend themselves to 'press and hold' style user input, especially not on touchscreen devices. It might work best if you use the button to start the command, and design it so that the command continues until you hit 'stop' or start a different command. That's not quite the same behaviour as the original hand-held controller, but should be reasonably intuitive.

Maybe a simple relay board like this as the switches are momentary.

Since there is going to be a tape recorder close to, relays are probably not the best option, both for noise and magnetic reasons.

I would go for optocouplers, they are cheap, simple to implement and will compleatly isolate the Arduino from the remote control device.

Here's a good intro to optocouplers:
http://tronixstuff.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/education-introduction-to-the-optocoupler/

Thanks for the replies everybody. Is there any reason why I can't just apply the 5v volts directly to the remote control pins from the arduino? Why do I need to use transistors or optocouplers? Pin 8 on the remote is a 5v supply and the buttons on the remote just apply this supply to pin 1-6...

garetht81:
Thanks for the replies everybody. Is there any reason why I can't just apply the 5v volts directly to the remote control pins from the arduino? Why do I need to use transistors or optocouplers? Pin 8 on the remote is a 5v supply and the buttons on the remote just apply this supply to pin 1-6...

What pin is the ground that you would need to share with the arduino?
How much current does closing a switch draw?
Less risk of fragging your arduino and/or Tascam if electrically isolated.

I think ground is pin 8, I need to double check that tho. I also need to measure the current, should be easily done by putting the multimeter in series across the switch...

Yes, I can see the benefits in isolation for safety so I may still go that way. Any other reason to use transistors? Optocouplers sound cool, and I think relays would be fine so long as they aren't near the tape heads!

Does it have to be wifi? Blue tooth would be cheaper i think and easier to setup. No problem with controlling from android or iphone. You could still have internet control as well your app could connect to the internet.

When I say wifi, I actually only mean i want to be able to control it with a wifi device, such as a tablet. The remote itself can be plugged in via ethernet because it will stay fixed in one spot along with the tape machine (tape machines are big and heavy!).
Eventually it would be cool to have a little box with another arduino in it that is the protable remote, instead of using a tablet or PC, it would have push buttons and LED's just like the original wired remote and I guess I could get this to communicated via bluetooth and/or over the wireless network. What is the range (distance) of bluetooth?

garetht81:
Eventually it would be cool to have a little box with another arduino in it that is the protable remote, instead of using a tablet or PC

Perhaps you could use an IR remote of the sort used to control TVs and so on? People have managed to send and receive IR control signals using an Arduino.

I would have thought the range of Bluetooth was well within the size of most studios.

Got this working pretty good. It plays, records, stops, ff and rw great, from any computer on my local network.

I can't seem to make it available over the internet though, can anybody critique my code on this?

byte mac[] = {
0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED }; //physical mac address
byte ip[] = {
192, 168, 1, 177 }; // ip in lan
byte gateway[] = {
192, 168, 1, 1 }; // internet access via router
byte subnet[] = {
255, 255, 255, 0 }; //subnet mask
EthernetServer server(1080); //server port

It's probably your router settings, nothing to do with your arduino code. You'll need to take a look at your router admin pages and set up (if you haven't already) direction of port 1080 traffic to your arduino.

I've setup the port on the router already, could it be something else?

Is there a difference between sharing locally and over the internet?

Sometimes your ISP will prohibit inbound traffic on specific ports - not sure if SOCKS is one that is commonly blocked. You could try a different one. Are you sure you have the right public facing IP address - they're not usually static unless you paid extra for the privilege. To eliminate the arduino, try using wireshark on your internal network and have someone external try to connect; do you see any packet traffic on your selected port?