[karlgrz]

Which ceiling fan remote? I've been fighting with our bedroom fan, we like the performance but the remote works maybe once out of every 100 presses unless I climb up on our bed and extend my arm into the middle of the fan housing.

[riveducha]

I went into the weeds of reverse engineering my Minka Aire ceiling fans with a USB RTL-SDR. In my case the manufacturer's remotes worked fine, but I wanted to integrate it in with Home Assistant. If you're interested, you can see what I did: https://www.riveducha.com/decode-wireless-signal-with-usb-tv...

I used a USB RTL-SDR ($15) and a Raspberry Pi to receive and transmit, but I think the Flipper Zero can do it all-in-one.

[margalabargala]

What $15 USB SDR can transmit? All the ones I have only receive, and to transmit I'm seeing more like $100. At $15 I would buy one immediately.

[cdchn]

I think people have managed to use the GPIO pins as a bit bang transmitter.

[sebcat]

See https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx

[riveducha]

Sorry, my wording was unclear. The USB RTL-SDR was for receiving, and I did the capture and analysis on my desktop. The Raspberry Pi was for transmitting using the GPIO pins.

[micromacrofoot]

Caution for other readers in the US getting an idea: the flipper zero can read radio fan remote signals, but the FCC doesn't allow it to transmit them. I was hoping I could have an "all the remotes" device with the zero, but radio is fairly limited. Perhaps someone will region unlock these.

[wolrah]

The official firmware limits the device to only being able to transmit on frequencies officially supported by the CC1101 chip that handles this range. It's technically capable of transmitting across a wider range but the manufacturer of the chip doesn't support it.

Beyond that the official firmware also limits the available frequencies by the device's region setting. There is a full list of the regional limits here: https://docs.flipperzero.one/sub-ghz/frequencies but they are of course intended to limit the device to only frequencies legally authorized for unlicensed remote control type uses in the region in question. It should generally work for any household appliance remotes, as long as the appliance was designed for the region it's being used in.

Either way, there's a reason I started both of those paragraphs with references to the official firmware. The device firmware is open source and there are multiple community-developed forks as a result, some of which make these limits configurable by the user.

[micromacrofoot]

> It should generally work for any household appliance remotes, as long as the appliance was designed for the region it's being used in.

Unfortunately not, I've got multiple fans from different manufacturers that were sold at major US retailers (i.e., not purchased online) and I can read the remote's transmission but I'm region locked out of transmitting it from the flipper zero. Going to try out some of the custom firmware though, thanks for the details.

[nickthegreek]

Sounds like you want one of the 3rd party firmwares.

https://github.com/djsime1/awesome-flipperzero

[micromacrofoot]

I was hoping someone would point me to something like this, thank you!

[InCityDreams]

>but the remote works maybe once out of every 100 presses unless I climb up on our bed and extend my arm into the middle of the fan housing.

Confused: if it (even irregularly) works under those conditions, have you tried not doing such, and see if it works more often?