Help making remote control LED lights

Yes, fair amount of work involved as you'd need a remote/reciever circuit in every room, all of them need to talk to the main box with the 5 LEDs in, if you can get them to manually push something instead of a remote that's a lot of time saving.. communications could be done over 400mhz or use wifi/esp8266 , it's time consuming

 

What is the maximum distance from a meeting room to the monitoring point?

 

Just as an example, you can buy a 9-channel (dry contacts) receiver with a long range antenna for $110. Remotes are around $20 each. Getting each remote to only actuate 1 unique channel on the receiver may be the hard part.

http://www.gamainc.com/remote-controls/

 

You appear to need multiple transmitters networked to a single receiver, each transmitter being uniquely identified by the receiver. An Arduino and an XBee module, six of them, will suffice for all of these requirements. The remotes each contain an Arduino and an XBee "shield" powered from four or five AA re-chargeable NiMH cells. Or you can use four disposable AA cells. Pressing a button on the remote sends a coded message to the central receiver, also consisting of an Arduino and Xbee shield, which then lights the appropriate LED. Since the central receiver is on all the time it should be powered from a 5 V "wall wart" power supply. It is not necessary that the central receiver send messages to the remotes, but this may be a desirable feature. For example, pressing a button on a remote could temporarily light an LED on the remote. The central receiver receives the message from the remote and then transmits an acknowledgment message to the remote, which upon receiving the message extinguishes the LED.

Everything should be housed in plastic boxes to maximize the range. At least one pair (central station and one remote) should be assembled and tested for range limitations before building the remaining four remotes.

There may be simpler or less expensive options, such as commercial garage door openers with coded transmitters. However, I have not seen any that allow for separate decoding of multiple transmitters (remotes). You would need a receiver with decoder for each remote transmitter, each transmitter having a different pre-set code so it is paired with only one receiver. However, this path does offer the possibility of an "off the shelf" solution albeit perhaps at a higher cost.

 

Conventional wireless doorbells might suffice. They usually have a selection of channels and tunes/tones. The sounders could be replaced by LEDs.

 

Yeah, I have one of these I installed years ago instead of wiring up the defunct door-bell/chimes circuit that failed thirty-something years ago. Small battery in the push-button switch has lasted for years. The plug-into-the-wall outlet receiver is located in the kitchen about thirty feet (ten meters or so) away. Works fine except it is triggered on by the Vitamix if that is plugged into the same convenience outlet. So the OP could just go to a home improvement store and purchase five of these and be done if the range is sufficient. As you mentioned, @Alec_t, the OP might need to hack the receiver to get rid of the annoying chime and replace same with an LED.

I like my Arduino + XBee approach because it would be a lot of fun to develop, but it's hard to justify for a rig that's only used for a few days once a year...