Malfunctions of infrared (IR) remote controls remote control(DU). It doesn't work, it's broken, the buttons can't be pressed.

The remote control began to act up, stopped working, and broke down. The buttons stopped pressing. Let's try to figure out the reasons and fix it. (10+)

Malfunctions of infrared (IR) remote controls. If the remote control is acting up, doesn’t work, is broken, the buttons can’t be pressed

The principle of operation and design of the infrared remote control.

The general operating principle of infrared remote controls is very simple. After you press the remote control button, the infrared LED installed in the front of the remote control begins to emit an infrared beam. This beam hits the IR receiver on the device and controls it. The beam from the IR remote control is a series of short infrared pulses. This is necessary for protection against interference and key coding. The receiver must recognize its own remote control and not react to foreign sources of IR radiation, for example, an electric heater, the sun, or the remote control of another device. In addition, the receiver must understand which key on the remote control is pressed. To do this, the remote control emits an intermittent beam containing pulses of different lengths, reflecting a specific code that the receiver recognizes.

Remote control problems

In general, the remote control is produced by manufacturers based on difficult operating conditions - constantly being in the hands of a person. Therefore, it breaks quite rarely. For his normal operation For many years it is necessary not to drop it, prevent moisture and liquid from getting into it, and take care of the batteries. Leaking batteries in the remote control can permanently damage it. Electrolyte from the batteries can damage the delicate wiring on the remote control board. If you temporarily do not use the remote control, store it without batteries.

Let's consider typical faults remote control

The batteries are low

The first thing you should check if the remote control starts acting up is the condition of the batteries. They can be measured with a tester. If it's simple AA batteries, the voltage should be 1.6 - 1.4 volts, if AA batteries, then 1.6 - 1.3 volts, if exotic power sources are used, then the voltage is according to the description for these batteries. Or you can not measure anything, just replace it and try to see if the remote control works normally.

Liquid or liquid contamination has entered the remote control

If ordinary water gets into the remote control, it should not be turned on. It is necessary to immediately remove the batteries and dry them thoroughly (about a day). After that it should work.

If sticky liquid contaminants, electrically conductive compounds, or electrolyte from batteries get into the remote control, you will have to wash it. To do this, open it and wash it with regular cold water. Do not use brushes or detergents; in extreme cases, you can use a soft brush. Dry thoroughly (but do not heat) without covering. Let's put it together, everything should work.

Poor contact, buttons do not work clearly

Contamination has entered the remote control keyboard. Remote controls are usually equipped with a membrane keyboard. This means that the keyboard consists of three elastic films. Two films with contacts and one with holes between these contacts. When pressed, the films are deformed, and the contacts through the holes in the middle insulating film are closed.

The remote control is unstable or has stopped working altogether

If all previous faults have been corrected and the remote control still does not work, then the reason is most likely that the connections inside the remote control have broken. On the board itself, connections are very rarely damaged, since they are applied to textolite and filled with varnish. Violation of such connections is almost impossible to detect and eliminate. You will be very lucky if you see such a defect when visual inspection. But these are very rare cases.

In my practice, much more often there was a failure of contact between the infrared LED at the place of its installation and the contact plates of the batteries at the place where they are connected to the board. The fact is that both the LED and the plates are subject to external deformation. It can lead to poor soldering and contact. The solution is to re-solder the contact. Do this with a well-heated soldering iron of suitable power, since the boards are very sensitive to heat and can be damaged if soldered for too long.

Finally

In any case, a broken remote control can be replaced with a new one. You can buy a suitable one, exactly the same as the one you had. They are available for sale, you just need to know exactly the brand of your equipment. Or a universal remote control that is suitable for different devices. Additional benefit universal remote control is the ability to control different devices from one remote control.

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The volume buttons on the remote control of the multimedia system Lars i Vensoon 2008 do not function. Could this be due to a virus located on the flash card from which the music was played. Thank you

The control panel does not work.

In most cases, you can try to restore the remote control (control panel) yourself.

Remote control (RC). We begin to understand how important this is after the remote control broke down. The best way out in this situation is to go to the store for a new remote control. But what to do if remote controls for your TV have not been produced even by the Chinese for a long time, or you have a rare, expensive model, or a specialized store is very far away, or... You never know what other “or” there may be. The remote control may fail completely or certain, especially popular buttons may stop working.

If the remote control refuses to work completely and replacing the batteries does not lead to anything good, then the first thing you need to do is determine what exactly to repair?

Just the remote control or the TV itself? To do this, you will need any digital camera, phone camera, digital camera or video camera. Unlike the human eye, the camera perfectly sees the IR radiation emitted by the remote control. All that remains is to turn on the camera and point the remote control at the lens. If the remote control is working, then when you press the button (it is advisable to hold down the “volume” - since it emits a series of flash pulses) on the remote control, you will see a white-blue glow.

checking the remote control using the camera

However, more often than not, the remote control does not fail completely, but as mentioned above, some buttons stop working completely or are triggered with great force. In this case, the remote control can be restored without any special skills.

Disassembling the remote control. First, remove the batteries from the remote control. Check if the remote control has mounting screws, which can also be hidden in the battery compartment and under various factory stickers. If there are no screws or you have already unscrewed them, take a wide screwdriver or a dull knife (in some cases, an old plastic card would be ideal) and try to push it into the gap between the two halves of the case.

Insert the tool into the slot.

Once this is successful, move the halves apart until a click appears. A click means that one of the latches has opened or broken.

push the halves apart until a click appears

Then, without removing the tool from the slot, we move it to the next latch and repeat the same manipulations, thus snapping off the entire body. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to avoid broken latches, and if your remote control does not have mounting screws, then during assembly, the remote control will need to be glued. Once all the latches are separated from each other, turn the remote control upside down and try to carefully separate the covers.

Open the remote control

The two main contacts in the battery compartment are usually hard soldered to the electrical board of the remote control and fixed with special grooves. Therefore, if, when removing the cover, the contacts do not come out on their own, they need to be helped with a screwdriver, carefully pushing them out of the grooves. Then, just as carefully, remove the remote control board and the rubber base of the buttons.

Cleaning and washing the remote control. If your remote control is not packaged in a plastic bag (and it’s not packaged for you, right?), then over time, in addition to ordinary dust, various fatty deposits accumulate on the board and on the rubber base. All this foreign mass worsens, and over time completely blocks and destroys the push-button contacts. Therefore, it is very advisable to remove all this evil spirits.

Please note: The contacts on the board may be tinned or graphite coated.

Those. metallic copper color or black.

Tinned contacts have a white metallic color, while graphite-coated contacts are black. Black contacts are not dirty! Therefore, you should not scrub graphite contacts until a copper trace appears, this will lead to damage to the contact.

If there are not many mud deposits and they are located only in some places, then you can limit yourself to cleaning only these local contaminants.

To do this, take a regular ear swab soaked in alcohol and wash off the plaque. It is highly undesirable to use acetone or other aggressive solvents. You need to wash off the deposits from the rubber base very carefully so as not to damage the conductive coating on the button contacts (black spots).

In case of extensive contamination, it is advisable to wash the board and rubber base with warm water and soap or washing powder using an old, soft toothbrush. Then thoroughly rinse off the foam. You can dry the board and base with a hairdryer or simply leave it in the air until completely dry.

If the remote control completely fails, we first check the battery compartment for oxidation and bending of the contacts. If oxides are visible on the contacts, they must be cleaned with a knife or screwdriver until they shine. The contacts themselves, and most often the springs, tend to bend or fall out of their mounting grooves. Here you may need narrow nose pliers or round nose pliers. If it is impossible to insert the contact directly from the battery compartment, you will have to disassemble the remote control (see “Disassembling the remote control” above).

If everything is fine with the contacts, then some special skills may be required, namely the ability to use a soldering iron. The first step is to remove all dirt and grease from the board. How this is done is described above.

After the remote control has been disassembled and cleaned, we look at the places where the radio components are soldered, and especially the places where the battery contacts and IR diode are soldered. Circular cracks often form in these places.

Ring crack.

You also need to carefully inspect the board itself to see if there are any cracks or kinks on it that could affect conductive paths. If such cracks are found, they need to be soldered. If the remote control has previously been subjected to various shocks and falls, then possible reason its failure may be due to the failure of the quartz resonator.

Quartz resonator.

The functionality of such a remote control can only be restored by replacing the resonator with a new one or a used one from any other, no longer needed remote control. If all of the above actions did not lead to the desired result, then qualified repairs are required, which, unfortunately, cannot be written about in one article.

Partial failure of the remote control is much more common. We disassemble and clean the remote control as described above. Sometimes, after a simple cleaning, the remote control starts working, so it would be good to check if a similar miracle has happened to your remote control.

As you have already noticed, the buttons are located on a common rubber base. A patch with a conductive coating is pressed into each button. This coating wears off after prolonged use. We will describe here three ways to restore conductivity.

Method one, we will need foil, preferably on a paper basis (for example, from a pack of cigarettes) and glue, for example “moment”. A circle with a diameter equal to the patch of the button is cut out of foil and glued directly onto this patch. Do not forget to degrease the surfaces to be glued. The glue you need to use is one that, when dried, forms an elastic mass. Chinese “super glue” cannot be used, since when it dries it forms a glass-like substance that will begin to crumble on the elastic contacts. The described method is the simplest and, unfortunately, not the most reliable.

Second way. Most remotes have buttons that you don't use or don't use at all. Using a blade, carefully cut off a patch at the root from the affected button and from the unused button. Then we glue the donor patch in place of the defective one. When cutting off a damaged patch, it is important not to damage the rubber base. A remote control restored in this way will last much longer than one restored using the first method.

Third way from our point of view, the most correct and reliable. Especially if you have a whole fleet of remote controls in use, from DVDs, from music. center, from a chandelier, etc. To do this, you need to purchase a special repair belt. kit for remote control. “Rem. kit,” this is of course a loud statement, since its kit includes only a few dozen conductive patches and, in some cases, special glue. Having such a rem. kit, you just need to stick a new patch in place of the old one.

Reassembling the remote control is done in the reverse order and should not cause any difficulties. Place the rubber base in place, making sure that all the buttons fit into their holes. When installing the board, pay attention to the battery contacts. They should sit evenly in their grooves. Then we connect the covers and squeeze the remote control along the edges with medium force so that all the latches snap into place. If broken latches cannot be avoided and as a result the halves of the remote control cannot be fixed tightly, you can use the legendary quick-drying Chinese super glue “super Glue”.

Good luck to you and the indescribable feeling of delight from a device you repaired yourself.

TV is present in every home today. Thanks to the development of technology, today's models of TV receivers are equipped with a remote control (RC). It is this small item that greatly simplifies the use of the TV. However, the remote control often breaks down: channels stop switching or some buttons do not perform their functions. Of course, there is no problem in purchasing a new remote control, but at the same time, you can figure out the cause of the breakdown and repair the useful accessory yourself.

Why doesn't the TV remote work?

To figure out why the TV stopped responding to the remote control, it is important to find out what failed - the remote control or the TV itself. To do this, you need to use a separate remote control and buttons located on the TV itself. If there is no response to the remote control, then this is the reason. At the same time, if, when controlled via buttons on blue screen If errors occur in executing commands, you must contact a specialist who can determine the malfunction of the TV itself.

ATTENTION! If the remote control malfunctions, you should find out: the device is not fully functioning or some buttons still work.

The TV does not respond to the remote control

When complete absence reaction of the TV receiver to remote control, there are 3 possible reasons:

• Battery failure is the most common and easily resolved cause;
• LED malfunction;
• communication defect on the circuit solder - this part is located inside the remote control and to eliminate this problem it is necessary to repair the internal board.

To begin with, it is recommended to replace the batteries. If this does not help, then you should inspect the LED. It is located at the top of the device. Its job is to transmit an infrared signal to the TV. To check the LED you should use one of modern gadgets, For example, mobile phone with a camera. You need to point the camera at the remote control and press a button on the remote control. If the LED is working properly, a stripe will appear on the mobile screen; in the opposite situation, the LED may be damaged if the remote control is dropped.

After eliminating the first two options, you should look for another cause of the malfunction. It is recommended to disassemble the remote control and carefully examine the details. The cause of a broken remote control may be the frequent fall of the remote control, as a result of which the board could crack or break internal parts remote control The result is a violation of the contacts of the remote control parts.

IMPORTANT! To consider board elements, it is recommended to use magnifying glass(magnifying glass).

Only some buttons work

When checking the remote control, you may find that only some buttons are functional. There could be several explanations for this:

• The coating between the most used buttons and the board is often erased;
• the remote control is heavily soiled;
• liquid has spilled onto the accessory;
• increased humidity in the room - because of this, condensation forms on the device, which gets inside.

With any of the above options, a breakdown is not considered a reason to purchase a new remote control. It is quite possible to fix it yourself.

How to repair the remote control yourself

Repair of the remote control depends on the cause of the malfunction. First you need to replace the batteries. If the cause of the device failure is a faulty LED, it should be replaced. Buy new element possible on any radio market.

When internal failure The remote control should be carefully disassembled so as not to damage the internal elements and the board.

ATTENTION! If you identify internal problems with the operation of the remote control that cannot be corrected yourself, it is recommended to contact a workshop.

Inspection of the board should be done using a magnifying device. It is better to start this procedure from the points of access to power (batteries). Further, if damage is detected in electrical circuit- the damaged part should be replaced. If damage to the microcircuits is detected, it is better to replace the remote control with a new one.

There may be oily liquid on the bottom of the remote control when it opens. You can remove it by wiping the surface with alcohol.

IMPORTANT! After cleaning, all elements of the remote control must be thoroughly dried.

If the coating between the buttons and the board has been erased, it can be restored (purchase a set for remote controls on the radio market or come up with linings in the form of foil).

A heavily contaminated remote control can, of course, be brought back to life. To do this, you need to clean it using an alcohol solution.

It won’t be amiss, but suddenly the problem can be solved quite simply.

The reason for non-functioning buttons may be batteries that are seated or have moved away from the sensors, an object standing in the way of the remote control, or the button may be due to stuck debris that can be removed without opening the case.

If these elementary possible problems are not related to the problem, it’s time to take decisive action.

Method 1

Most often, the keys on the remote control stop working due to accumulated grease and dirt. To avoid this, of course, you need to acquire habits:

• do not pick up dirty;


• do not hold the remote control in your hand for a long time;


• Don't keep the remote control on the dining table.

Well, if trouble has already struck, then you can’t do without an autopsy.

First you need to remove the batteries. Using a screwdriver, unscrew all the screws that hold the remote control panel. If the housing mount is fixed without the help of additional devices, it must be opened using a dull knife, prying one of the flaps. This must be done very carefully so that the plastic does not crack.

It is important to photograph all the contents of the opened remote control to simplify the final assembly of the device.

The interior of the remote control printed circuit board and a rubberized keyboard. Large areas of dirt are removed using an old toothbrush, and grease is removed with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol.

You can assemble the remote control only after it has completely dried. If you have any doubts about the location of the parts, you can always check what was done earlier.

Method 2

If specific buttons stick and hygienic treatment of the board does not help, then perhaps the problem lies in a worn out rubber pad. To eliminate this, before disassembling it is necessary to write down the buttons that do not work, and only then open the device case.

Under non-functioning buttons, you should install cushions made of small pieces of food foil attached to office glue. After assembly broken buttons must earn.

With prolonged and intensive use, radio equipment's remote controls begin to develop characteristic malfunction. The remote control buttons stop responding to pressing. This happens due to pollution contact pads board and rubber buttons, or due to wear and tear on the conductive coating of the buttons. To restore the operation of the remote control, you can carefully disassemble the remote control, clean the pads and buttons with a damp cloth, and apply a little conductive glue to the buttons. But there is another way to restore the remote control. This is to use pieces of foil glued to conductive rubber bands.
To repair the remote control we will need scissors, a knife, tweezers, Monolith glue and cigarette foil.

Remove the batteries from the remote control. Use a knife to carefully separate the remote control into two halves. The halves of the remote control are usually fixed with latches like this.

Drop a little glue onto the conductive coating and, taking the square with tweezers, glue it.

Our remote control has five buttons that are not used. Therefore, it is not necessary to glue foil on them.

This method restored the functionality of many remote controls of various radio equipment. A repeated defect appears after about a year. You can restore the operation of the buttons again by tearing off the old foil and gluing a new one. And one more piece of advice. To check the operation of the remote control, you need to point the lens of any digital camera on the infrared LED of the remote control and press any button. If the LED blinks, then we can assume with great confidence that the remote control is working.