Record and playback simple radio [control] signals

Hi, I am a total newbie to microcontrollers and am super excited to be receiving my Espruino pre-order soon. I'm an advanced Javascript and Linux user though.

I have electric blinds in my apartment operated with a very simple (and annoying) radio controller. I thought it would be cool to capture it's signals and create a more useful interface.

Any hints on what components I would need to do this, and a general pointer on how to get started? I'm a fast learner and up for the challenge.

Hi. I guess the first thing to do would be to have a look inside the remote control and see what's in there. It's likely that there's a radio module inside, and you can look at the model number and work out what frequency it transmits on. You could then buy something else that transmits on the same frequency.

Then, I guess you have to figure out what signal it sends. It's probably better to look inside the module itself, as if where you live is anything like here then there are signals floating around all over the place and you'll never figure out which one is the one for the blinds!

You could use a logic analyser (you can buy USB ones quite cheap) but you may be able to connect Espruino up to the remote control (once you know what the radio module is and what pin is the data input pin) and write some code that outputs what the signal is.

After that it should be pretty easy to duplicate those signals and to see what happens!

As a less cool but possibly faster hack, you could take the remote apart and solder wires to the button connection points and Espruino pins. Then it should just be a simple matter of sending a '1' to the pin to activate that function. Of course, doing it this way you don't learn as much about the underlying remote control operation.

Yes, that's probably significantly more sensible. Thanks! :)

Hey Gordon, thanks for the quick response! Exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. Cephdon, that's a surprisingly simple and obvious solution that never even crossed my mind... definitely a good fallback although I think I'm going to try figure this stuff out to greater depth. Will be in touch once my pre-order units arrive :)

Don't know if you saw it, but I recently added this: http://www.espruino.com/Remote+Control+Sockets

It might be similar to your remote control...