AnirOCX v1.01 (Obsolete)

Welcome to AnirOCX, an ActiveX control which can be used to develop apps which use the Animax Anir remote control unit. This hardware product is a hand help remote control unit which can be connected to your PC via a serial port. I purchased one a number of months ago and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked. Unfortunately it uses a VXD driver which means that it cannot be used on NT. This was one of the main reasons behind the development of AnirOCX. This OCX gives the developer the support to use the remote control with their apps in whatever way they want. For example if you were developing a presentation product you could use AnirOCX to provide hands free remote control of your product from across the hall. For the more ambitious you could develop an app which provides general remote support for the Windows shell.

The complete source code to the OCX is included in AnirOCX. As part of the source code a reusable C++ class called CAnirRemoteControl (anir32.cpp/h) is included which the MFC/C++ developers among you may prefer to use instead of the OCX model. Using this class directly instead of the OCX also means that you have the option of statically including both MFC and the remote control code rather than having to redistribute the anir.ocx plus its MFC support dlls.

For the hard core developers out there, the source code is also a good example of using overlapped IO, synchronization techniques, multithreading, low level serial comms, IR signal decoding and high precision timing techniques. And you get all of that in a 30k binary <g>.

Download Instructions

• If you haven't already got the MFC DLL’s on your machine (MFC42.DLL in your Windows system directory), then grab them from http://www.naughter.com/download/vcredist.exe.
• Download the enclosed zip file. This contains the AnirOCX binaries, source code, demo programs and documentation.

Updates

21 June 2008

• Please note that this code is now obsolete as the company Animax was bought by 3M in February 2008 and the Animax remote control unit is no longer available. If you are looking into getting a remote control for your PC for home automation type purposes, then I would recommend you check out the RedRat3 receiver.

V1.01 (24 March 1998)

• Now using PostMessage instead of SendMessage. This prevents possible deadlock problems when calling the Stop method.
• Removed some incorrect comments from the code base
• Code now compiles cleanly when built for UNICODE
• Updated documentation to include info on registering ocx

V1.0 (19 March 1998)

• Initial public release.