this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2026
930 points (98.8% liked)
Privacy
50950 readers
1275 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This should be a web site or YT channel. How to remove such bits without bricking the item.
To be fair, OP didn’t claim that the remote wasn’t bricked…
It works! I was fully prepared for it to not work and explain to my wife why we need to order a new one, but no issue at all lmao
Could probably have measured its resistance, then put a plain resistor in its place.
Probably, but the nuclear option is always more fun
With these people (advertisers), the nuclear option is sometimes the only real option.
It's fine, you've essentially replaced it with an infinite resistor. With the low currents that a microphone generate, theres just no signal going into the ADC now so it's just silent.
So if the remote still works then wouldn't that mean there is still a microphone? Or have they gone back to line of sight infrared? Or am I just thinking of the really really old remote tech?
...when have remote signals ever used microphones?
Not fully related, but early TV remotes used sound rather than IR. The buttons made a distinctive "click" noise, from a mechanical mechanism. The different clicks were detected in the TV and used as input.
Plus side, no batteries to deal with.
Down side, about as (un)reliable as you would expect.
That's wild. How did the TVs identify the distinctive sound? That seems like it would be a pretty interesting engineering trick.
I believe it was old school analogue electronics, but I'm speculating there.
I just looked it up, it was ultrasonic signals. The main one was the Zenith Space Command.
Cool, thanks! No problem. I understand it was analog electronics and using an ultrasonic signal makes sense, but what I wondered about was how did the receiving end (the TV) differentiate between the signals for the different buttons and then decide to execute different procedures based on that. Still pretty interesting in any case.
Speculating, but I would guess they applied a band pass filter to it. You can then either take a simple threshold value, or look for a rapid change and trigger off that. 4 buttons means 4 sets of filters, each tuned to a different frequency.
That said, the analogue electronics engineers of yesteryear were insanely competent and making analogue circuits do interesting things to save money or space.
Ah, yes, that makes sense, thanks! Totally agreed on those old school engineers being insanely competent and creative.
Randomly this appeared in my feed.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Qpyd7TsH14Y
Doesn't say anything about the receiver side, but shows the mechanism quite well.
Oh, awesome, thank you. Very interesting and very creative. No batteries!
The microphone would only be used for voice control. So that would fail, but buttons would still work normally.
It's a smart remote, they use bluetooth or IR as a fallback. The microphone is only for voice control.
Looking up which part to nuke took an hour, but anything to calm down my paranoid ass haha
Not paranoid, sane and careful for today's world.
"Oh good, he fell for the decoy"
oh no
Could you share your knowledge here? I clicked this thread expecting to find instructions to help us follow your advice.
While it’s not always the case, try to look for a 2x4 silver rectangle with a hole in it like the one on my finger. The casing is to isolate it from the nearby radio waves and the hole to let sound through.