Electronic – arduino – Activate garage remote via an Arduino

arduinoremote control

I have a RF remote control for the garage that I would like to control via Arduino.

With a multimeter, I detected around 3v across the button.

I have soldered two wired on either side of one of the buttons, and connected one side to digital pin 12 and the other to ground.

While this worked fine, I did notice that the remote depleted of all battery in a day.

Trying to marry theory with practice, did this occur because I did not use a pull-up / pull-down resistor?

Update
RF Board with Arduino
As recommended by Cornelius, I removed the battery and connected the 3.3V and Ground directly to the battery terminals.

As Andy Aka predicted, I measured the voltage from ground to the positive terminal of the button, and it is ~5V, which will end up damaging the board.

Best Answer

Connecting arduino ground and an IO pin across the button is probably really not recommended. For a start you might find that your arduino ground and IO pin are now forcing the transmitter to have maybe up to 6V across it: -

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

I'm not saying the wiring is like this BUT neither are you - you are guessing and you might do some damage so tread carefully. Ideally you need to connect the arduino ground pin to ground on the radio (see the symbol I've drawn) and the GPIO line to where the transmit circuit of the switch is.

I can also see why your battery became drained because, when you shut your arduino down it in effect shorted the switch and probably transmitted a constant carrier wave all day!!

Related Topic