The Remote Control Box

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WHAT
 A small wooden box that functions as a wireless remote control for the light in my wife's room: when the box is open the light comes on, when closed the light goes off.

WHEN
I actually made this a year and a half ago for Christmas 2003 but I had to largely rebuild it recently so this time I took pics. This description covers the rebuild, which is a significant improvement over the initial design.

WHY
Like the Typewriter-Keyboard Conversion, this was insipred by a desire to make my beloved wife's life a bit easier. She has two lights in her room, neither of which has a switch anywhere near her bed; so if she wants to read in bed before going to sleep, when she turns the light out she has to get up, walk across the room, turn off the light, and stumble back in the dark, hoping not to step on any of her collages in progress on the floor. I had seen those little remote-control-anything devices around, the kind where you plug anything (usually a light) into the main unit, plug that into an outlet, and then have a remote control that simply turns it on or off.



I thought that would work nicely, but they're generally plastic and tacky looking, qualities that do not suit Heather's room. Time, then, for some hacking.

HOW
The Alemany Flea Market netted me a couple cheap boxes, one of which looked especially neat and suited my needs perfectly.



The first thing I did was to take apart the remote control from the remote-control-anything gizmo.

                

The black button in the left picture is the key: that's what gets pressed when the button on the remote is pressed, so I would have to reproduce that button pressing. Turning it over, I looked at the circuitboard on the back and found the posts on the back of the switch (right) - close the circuit between those - as pressing the button does - and the remote sends its signal.

So I screwed contacts into the box that would touch whenever the box was opened or closed, causing the remote to send its signal. The bar  is a screw-top buffer attachment that I never use for my Dremel.



Then it was just a matter of soldering the wires to the circuit board



tucking it into place



making it look pretty



and closing it up.



The end.

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erik AT multipledigression DOT com