We have a couple of split air conditioners. One of them is reasonably old (1987 model) and when we bought the place it came without a remote. We will eventually have to redo the roof and will replace all ACs with more modern and hopefully higher efficiency models. Until then, however, I was hoping to build a remote for this unit – and yes, we have tried just about every existing universal remote model, which turn out not to be so “universal.”

This is the outside of the unit

And here is the part of the control panel that’s exposed (we have been using the manual on-off switch but it provides zero additional control)

Any suggestions for how to get started on this would be much appreciated. There are quite a few tutorials online for building a remote but most of them assume you are trying to control something modern (and/or start with reverse engineering the existing remote, which, well if we had that …).

We have a couple of split air conditioners. One of them is reasonably old (1987 model) and when we bought the place it came without a remote. We will eventually have to redo the roof and will replace all ACs with more modern and hopefully higher efficiency models. Until then, however, I was hoping to build a remote for this unit – and yes, we have tried just about every existing universal remote model, which turn out not to be so “universal.”

This is the outside of the unit

And here is the part of the control panel that’s exposed (we have been using the manual on-off switch but it provides zero additional control)

Any suggestions for how to get started on this would be much appreciated. There are quite a few tutorials online for building a remote but most of them assume you are trying to control something modern (and/or start with reverse engineering the existing remote, which, well if we had that …).