I tend to favor making these proprietary controllers my slaves. Carrier is like Dell or Amazon: they don't make a whole lot of their own hardwre. They used to assemble their own units when they were just wires and relays, but with the modernist realm we live in today, it costs too much to do that in the USA anymore. So they have engineered plans made up that they farm out to a corporate supplier.
Most of these electronic solutions are devised by a very small group of designers. The only thing that is unique between the thousands of versions of controls lies essentially in software or firmware. A proprietary firmware is built to do the job and the brain chip is flashed with it. All the strange comms and button boxes you describe are is a means to an end. The brain chip sorts all this out and generic logic signals come out the other side.Once the stuff comes out of the other side of the tunnel, it directly controls things like buffer chips or optocouplers or light dependent resistors or etc. You are better off intercepting these nervous system signals on their way and controlling the muscles that way.
Trying to decode serial comms and get your result that way is a whole domain of cryptography that not many people know much about. One false move and you're dead kind of work. It helps immensely if you are a hardware communications expert, if not, prepare to learn way too much about the subject. Not a task for trial and error. If you decide to go that way, you have your work cut out for you.
Since I started warping electronic devices, I have had a high amount of success making lots of devices act the way I think they should. Many of the micro controlled devices have inputs and outputs that can be pretty directly wired into an arduino board or similar controller. The power supply is there, sensors and muscles are there, who says I have to use a 200 dollar button box and a strange dongle to make the thing act like I don't want it to? I can stick a dev board in its place for 20 bucks and assume control of everything!
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