Hello!

I have a chinese toy that has a remote control which looks a bit like a car key.

I have an ADHD project idea to hack this device so that I can programmatically activate it using my computer.

I’m not an expert on radio frequencies but I’m itching to learn more, and I hope that this is somewhat of the correct place to ask this question. If not then I would love some suggestions on other places to look at.

I’m a programmer and know some basic electronics but all of these frequencies are a mystery to me. It seems that I can achieve what I want using this $299 hardware (which I want, eventually) but I can’t justify the cost to hack my $2.99 remote control. (EDIT: I found a knockoff on wish for $100 which I’m actually considering now)

My question is if there’s any way to really cheaply hack it using a computer with WIFI antennas and bluetooth, and/or some gadget that’s significantly cheaper.

The remote control is not showing up as a wifi hotspot or a bluetooth device but in my simpleton mind I can’t see why I wouldn’t be able to use those anyways? isn’t an antenna just an antenna? Is there some hardware filtering going on so that the computer can only read the very specific frequencies that wifi and bluetooth uses and anything even slightly diverging from that gets ignored?

Thanks a lot for any help.