I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the Anavi Infrared pHAT to consolidate all the remote controls (TV, DVD, cable box, etc.) in our household to a single interface available on a tablet or smartphone.

The Raspberry Pi Zero W works perfectly as a local web server while the Infrared pHAT can record and play back the infrared signals from any brand of remote control.

Controls on a personalized web page can be "clicked" to send any command or even group of commands to one or more devices. For example: I can group commands to turn on the cable box and the TV and tune to my favorite news channel. It’s simple and convenient enough that my whole family has been using it for three years now.

For software, I used good old LIRC for the Anavi Infrared PHAT and Apache2 for the web server. The main preparatory work consisted of recording the infrared commands from the various remote controls and then preparing the web page according to each user’s needs.

If you’re interested, all of the files are available on Github.