Skip to main content

Arduino control of PTX4 remote

I wanted to control the opening and closing of my front gate using the ESP8266. The gate uses a standard PTX4 remote, which is readily available at many hardware stores.

To my surprise, I couldn't find a hardware module that I can buy off-the-shelf and interface with the ESP8266. So I bought an extra remote, paired it with the gate receiver and proceeded to take it apart to see how I can use the circuitry inside.

SW4 is the button I press to open/close the gate. Points (1) and (2) are the junctions I need to short using a relay to simulate a button press. I measured point (1) to be 12V, so I need a 12V relay for this to work. The one that's readily available to me is SY4032. Since the operating voltage is 12V, I also need to use a MOSFET (the good ol' 2N7000) to drive the relay.

The gate pin needs to be grounded with a resistor, otherwise a spurious signal might be sent to the relay when the MCU is first powered on.

Another thing I did was to get rid of the A23 battery by connecting a DC booster (MT3608) to the 5V output of the WEMOS D1 Mini and calibrating it to output 12V.  So now the entire circuit can be driven by the USB input to the WEMOS D1 Mini without the need for an extra battery.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cooling mod for the X96 Air #2

Previously, I added a USB cooling fan to the X96 Air TV box . The problem with this mod is that the fan is always running, and it runs at full speed. Ideally, the fan should kick in only when the CPU temperature is above a certain threshold. It would be even better if there is a way to control the fan speed. Dan McDonald left me a comment pointing to his project on Github . He basically connected the fan to a USB relay that can be controlled by Python script. His project inspired me to make a similar mod that would make use of the spare D1 Mini boards I have lying around. The plan is to hook up the fan to a MOSFET (2N7000) and control it via PWM. Here's the very simple circuit: The code simply reads a single character from the serial port (0 - 9). 0 will turn the fan off, while 1 - 9 will generate a proportional PWM to drive the fan, with 1 being the lowest and 9 being the highest. Here's the Arduino code: #include <Arduino.h> void setup () { Serial . begin ( 9600 ...

Installing and customizing CoreELEC in X96 Air

I previously installed CoreELEC on another TV Box ( Ugoos X3 Pro ), which unfortunately died after only 9 months during the summer (due to the unit overheating, which I learned is a common problem for cheap Android TV boxes). So this time I purchased a X96 Air  (4GB/32Gb) and had to do the whole thing again. So this is a note-to-self in case I ever have to install CoreELEC again on some other device. Installation of CoreELEC is simple enough by following this guide . Basically, it involves downloading and writing the firmware to a microSD card using usbimager . Then insert the microSD card, reset the unit and hold the reset until the logo appears. The unit will then proceed to boot into CoreELEC. First thing is to connect to WiFi, then enable SSH. This allows me to login via ssh and execute: ceemmc -x from the terminal. This writes CoreELEC to the built-in eMMC storage, after which I am able to remove the microSD card and reboot the unit into CoreELEC via the built-in sto...

Cooling mod for the X96 Air

I realized after my Ugoos box died that overheating is a big problem with cheap Android TV boxes. A teardown of the Ugoos box shows that it does not have any heatsink or fan at all!  The X96 Air does have a heatsink, but the heatsink is located at the bottom of the casing with no ventilation. In this default configuration, with the ambient room temperature at 25c and playing a 1080p video, I was seeing the CPU temperature at 67c. I drilled a couple of holes at the bottom of the casing. The CPU temperature fell to 59c with the box raised about 2cm with plastic blocks. I retrieved an old 5V laptop fan: Then cut and strip away a spare USB cable: Solder the red and black wires on the fan and the cable: Secure the fan to the bottom of the casing with double-sided tape, then plug the fan into the box's USB connector. Here's a view of the box with some 3D-printed risers installed at the bottom to give the mounted fan sufficient clearance: The CPU now runs at 43c, a huge drop from the ...