Nowadays, just about every item of home entertainment gear has its own remote control, so you can control its operation without ever having to get up from your easy chair – if you don’t want to, that is. Most homes have plenty of remotes but in most cases their reliability isn’t wonderful. Probably that’s because they have to take quite a lot of physical pounding: easily dropped, squashed, kicked, trodden on, splashed with drink and otherwise abused.

When a remote fails completely, it’s usually just a matter of replacing the battery and away it goes again for another year or two. But what about when replacing the battery doesn’t fix it or one or two of the buttons seem to have stopped working? Then it can get a bit tricky and you want to be sure the fault is in the remote rather than in the equipment it’s supposed to control.

Unfortunately most of the remotes made in the last few years don’t seem to be made for easy access to the insides, without damaging the case. They’re clipped together using a series of tiny lugs, moulded into the inside edges of the case top and bottom. The lugs can be hard to find from the outside and even harder to unclip without breaking one or more of them. So you don’t want to open up a remote unless it’s absolutely necessary.

The little IR Remote Checker described here is designed to help in such cases, letting you quickly find out whether or not any suspect buttons are sending out codes from the remote’s IR LED. This will let you decide whether the fault is in the remote or in the equipment itself.