Broken Remote
Don’t mess with me if you are a remote. Above are the broken remnants of a Gliderol TM-305C remote control that never worked properly. One day it chose to not work properly at the wrong time and as a result got smashed to bits by myself. Temper, temper. After calming down I bought another remote off of eBay thinking it wasn’t too much of a hassle because programming the remote to run our garage door is a doddle. Little did I think about how to program the remote to work our front gate. After some internet searches (useless) and poking about inside the gate actuator I figured out how to program the remote so I thought I would post it up here so I have a reminder of how to do it the next time I take out my frustrations on the remote control.
Deimos Gate Actuator
Above you can see the Deimos BT gate actuator that moves the gear rack attached to the bottom of our sliding gate. The actuator cover is held on by two stainless screws which when removed allow you to see the innards of the actuator as shown below.
Deimos Gate Actuator Innards
The actuator looks pretty neat, at the top left you can see two 12V batteries so we can open the gate when the power is off. The grey box at the front contains the actuator controller and just peeking around the top right is a fashionable looking beige box that contains the receiver for the Gliderol remotes. I worked this out because someone had helpfully labelled the box “1814 G/Matic Receiver Stand Along”. “G/Matic” presumably stands for Glidermatic which is Gliderol’s name of choice for anything electrical or electronic.
Glidermatic Receiver Box
Removing the natty beige cover was done by unscrewing four screws and hey presto we are in circuit board land.
Receiver Circuit Board
Now this circuit board looked pretty identical to the receiver board in our Gliderol garage door opener (you can see the Gliderol Remote Training Instructions here). Given it’s similarity I used the same technique to program the remote. I pressed the button on the circuit board (indicated by the arrow labelled A) which made the LED on the board (labelled helpfully as B) switch on. Then I pressed the big button on the new Gliderol remote which made the LED turn off.
And hey presto. Pressing the top auxiliary button on the Gliderol remote made the gate open. I am not sure how the remote (or the gate actuator) knows to use the auxiliary button to work the gate instead of the main remote button. But hey, these are the things of electronic pixies and programmable fairies. Let’s leave some things unexplained so life is more interesting.