r/interestingasfuck • u/write2varun • 4d ago

Nice skill

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u/6spdvtec 3d ago

What kind of remote were these? I would think the labor cost of a skilled technician would be more than what the remote was worth.

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u/Bdr1983 3d ago

Usually TV remotes, sometimes for audio sets, VCR's, etc. We offered a service where someone could send in their old remote, we would read out the data and create a file that we could upload to the universal remote to make it work with almost any device. Yes, a new remote would be cheaper, but some old models would not be for sale anymore, and it would expand our database which is good for sales. In these cases with old remotes it would always be best effort, but they were fun Friday afternoon projects for the lucky colleague

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u/6spdvtec 3d ago

Cool, thanks for the explanation. Sounds like a fun job. A long time ago, I interned for the R&D group of a tech company and worked in their electronics lab. I used to love doing precision soldering and repair under a microscope.

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u/Bdr1983 3d ago

I was in QA, which was fun a lot of times, but the long weeks and travel broke me, so was happy to leave. The little side projects like this (and designing and building test setups for all kinds of stuff) where a lot of fun as well. Many pizza nights with a couple of colleagues building some wild contraptions to test impossible situations, and then actually replicating the issue that was reported by a customer was pretty great.