I run a cool breeze evaporative cooler. It’s an old one but very effective.
The picture is of the controller in the passage. It’s in the center of the house.
I want to be able to control the cooler from my phone.
The local distributor doesn’t have a solution for me.
Any out of the box ideas to convert this to a wifi enabled device ?
Your wife? Send her to change the settings on your demand. Know of a cheap hospital too.
Sorry, just had to. 
Wire the button traces with relays controlled by an ESP32 with Tasmota or Esphome (in parralel), that way either the button or the relay can provide the button press.
The other option would be to use a signal sniffer to read the commands the controller sends to the device. Then you can program the ESP to send those commands. If the interface runs on RS485 you might be able to leave the existing controller in place and use either that or the ESP.
A RS485->USB thing is cheap enough, and should allow you sniff what’s on the wire.
More long term, something like this, which you will initially wire to only read (no write). DE and RE is wired together and pulled low to put it in reading mode.
Later on, in final implementation, your microcontroller will raise the RE/DE combo to high to switch to writing mode, before sending the data.
