How to check your TV zapper is working.

[Stan]

Apologies to tech gurus everywhere. This is the simple man's ( eg. me ) guide to checking if the zapper for your TV/video/security light etc etc is producing infrared ( IR ) light when you press a button. You can't see IR light with your naked eye, so try this.

Aim the zapper into your mobile phone camera while viewing the image screen. Press any button and hold it for a couple of seconds. The LED in the zapper should light up on your mobile screen flickering a magenta colour. If this happens you know it is producing IR light.

If you don't see the magenta flickering, then you have one of two things.

Either:-

The zapper is defective in some way. Could be something as simple as a flat battery.

Or:-

Your mobile camera has an IR filter and is screening out the flickering. Check if there is an IR filter on the bumph that came with your phone - You know! The stuff you threw away half an hour after you opened the box. Or look it up online. ( Or ask a friendly eight year old for help ). Or try some other zappers on your phone camera and see if they have the magic purple flicker. If you have a zapper you know works but there is no flicker, then it is a good bet you have an IR filter. Maybe your eight year old grandson/daughter can help once again.

*****

I have a security light on an outside wall high up, controlled by a zapper. I fitted it because SWMBO wanted one like this. After a while the zapper didn't control it anymore. Using the above, I now know the fault is with the main unit not the zapper. After some more tea, I will look at that....

 

[ajs]

Nice trick, thanks! Not something I want to do often but I'll remember this when it comes up.

 

[Myfordman]

To me a "zapper" is a device to kill or disable something else.
I think you mean "remote control"

 

[Pedronicus]

To me a "zapper" is a device to kill or disable something else.
I think you mean "remote control"

Here we call the r/c the 'hoofa doofa'.

 

[ajs]

Here we call the r/c the 'hoofa doofa'.

I always associate that with that Noel Edmunds thing - Telly Addicts I think it was. Never heard of it outside of that. It's probably the kind of thing subject to regional variations and even forming part of each household's own "private" vocabulary.

 

[Sachakins]

The zapper in r 'ouse is the "argument maker"

 

[Deadeye]

i test mine by pointing it at the telly

 

[Lard]

Humorous line from the very gently, but funny, ‘Detectorists’ comedy. He was trying to ‘woo’ his girlfriend back after she had left him……in regard to the numerous remote controls they had, it went something like “please come back, your the only one that knows how to turn the tv on”