Updated garage remote control case for wall mounting

We have one of those kits that converts a manual garage roller door into an electric remote control roller door. It’s been mostly fine, if you don’t mind doing a little dance in the house doorway to get it to open as it’s at the limit of its range. Over time the rubber over the button has been deteriorating, so I thought it time to try something new.

This is how the button had deteriorated.

Car remote

A while back I put the second remote into an old USB power bank box and place a big button on the box. The unit has been hot met glued onto the car’s dash. I chose hot melt glue because it is easy to install and should be easy to remove with isopropyl alcohol. This unit has been working well.

House remote

For the house remote I decided to build it into a small box and mount it to the wall. I wanted to go with a big button in a rectangular box look. In the end, it didn’t come out as expected, but it is good enough.

The remote has five buttons, but the open/close button is the only one we use, so it’s the only one I included on the box. I left the original button on the circuit board and simply connected the external switch in parallel.

The box was made from pine. The size is not ideal, but I already had the box from another project and ended up not using it for that one.

I wanted to be able to easily mount and remove the box from the wall and for the first time I tried making a French cleat. This worked really well.

This is the wall part of the French cleat. The remote simply hooks over it.

I connected a small antenna to the remote module, which extended the range slightly. Now, it works reliably from inside the house. The antenna, however, ended up at a bit of a jaunty angle, which is slightly annoying since I drilled the hole with my small drill press.

I had trouble thinking of a way to mount the module for easy battery changes. In the end I simply hot glued a magnet I had salvaged from some packaging onto the side of the box and used it to hold the module by the battery holder.

I bought two switches from AliExpress. Both were sold as 60mm. One is red and dome shaped. The other is flat and blue.

This is the blue one.

And this is the red one.

And mounted on the wall.

Both work well and that’s the main thing. I think a smaller button would have been better, but I’ll leave it as is at least for now. There are plenty of more things I want to do.