The Universal Garage Door Opener, created in July 1994, was designed to open many popular RF-based, non-rolling code garage door systems. Most garage door systems of that type use a series of DIP switches to set the transmit and receive addresses. If the address of the garage door receiver matches that of the garage door transmitter, the garage door will open.

A standard garage door opener was obtained and the physical DIP switches were replaced with a timer and binary counter to automatically cycle through all 2¹⁰ (1024) possible address combinations. A 555 timer in astable configuration generates a square wave (frequency adjustable using a potentiometer), which serves as the clock input to the CD4040 12-stage binary counter. LEDs on each output give a visual indication of the current address.

Schematic: Universal Garage Door Opener