In case the author of the post reads these comments… Thank you very much for sharing this with us. My daughter had leukemia (ALL) at a young age - your post gives me a glimpse into how she might have experienced the treatment. She was too young at the time to be able to describe her how it felt.
This annoys me too. My Casablanca fans have a wall switch which is hard wired to power only for on/off, but the fan and light controls are sent via a radio frequency signal. The most frustrating part of this, is that the RF transmitter inside the wall switch is battery operated. I have to unscrew the wall switch a couple times a year to get to the batteries.
Trust me, it could be worse. When we bought our house, the living room fan was hardwired with no switch. Literally you could only control it directly and hope it did what you asked it to do, there was no way to turn it off without turning off the entire circuit.
I suspect this is a code violation, but considering part of the lighting wiring in the basement had been done with speaker wire and automotive cabling, I don't think compliance was on the top of the previous owner's list.
As someone that designs battery powered RF devices. It's shocking an disheartening seeing stuff like that.
Things drawing an average of a few hundred microamps while the fan is running. Probably because it's blasting a keep alive packet once a second or so. It does that because a transceiver costs an extra 50 cents.
Probably not anything more complicated than running some kind of signal receiver while clicking each button on the remote and then capturing/replaying it. I highly doubt there's much if any security around the fan remote signals lol.
I did exactly the same thing for a different brand of DIP-switch-addressable remote-control fan back in 2016. It's been wonderful.
It wasn't that hard; I used gnuradio with an SDR to see what the remotes were sending and just pressed buttons and flipped switches until I figured out what all the bits were. There was no encryption whatsoever.
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