# Seeking Hardware Hacking Advice

By [Continuations](https://continuations.com) · 2016-08-22

hardware, hacking, air conditioning

---

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

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/8a29d90d1727fe989f1caa35ab8b1775.jpg)

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)

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/c3e8f5175c58e948d33c36887203b275.jpg)

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 …).

---

*Originally published on [Continuations](https://continuations.com/seeking-hardware-hacking-advice)*