Homemade Arduino TV-B-Gone

When I was younger I had this really cool gadget called a TV-B-Gone Pro and it’s basically a universal remote. You can use it to turn on or off any TV in the world and it was really fun to mess with people. My friends and I would go to restaurants where lots of people would be watching TV and use the remote to turn them off. The chaos of TV's turning off suddenly was one of the funniest things to witness in person.

This one broke a long time ago and I always wanted to use another one so I challenged myself to make one that was smaller, better and stronger.

Instead of using the weak IR LEDs like the original. I used a massive 10 watt IR LED chip which made the range much better.

Unfortunately because of the pandemic I can’t get any shots of me turning off TVs in malls bars or anywhere else that you would normally see a tv, but in the video I have a demonstration in my house

It really is a cool project to build and most people can’t believe when it works.

Assembly

So first I assembled the circuit on a breadboard and then flashed the code over to the Arduino Nano.

I got the code from Ken Sherriff's blog, which was immensely helpful as he compiled a list of all the TV On and Off codes.

TV-B-Gone: http://www.righto.com/2010/11/improved-arduino-tv-b-gone.html

I’ve created a schematic and added it to this project as well. All there is to it is a MOSFET attached to an Arduino, driving an LED. The DC voltage booster just steps the voltage up from 3.7V to the 5V that the Arduino and LED needs.

Once everything’s ready to go you can see that when I ground Pin 2 The code starts and it begins to cycle through its list of TV codes.

To troubleshoot I used the blue LED to see The pattern of flashes. These patterns of flashes are actually sequences of ‘code’ that the TV uses to interpret as the on or off signal from a TV remote.

The red LED is just letting me know that it’s cycling through the code and it’s just running off the pin 13 built onto the Arduino so it’s actually not even necessary.

Because of the weak range using the small infrared LEDs I decided to upgrade to a 10W LED chip. These modules are normally used in security cameras to light up entire yards in infrared light.

I chose a 10 W LED because anything larger will actually start to damage your eyes without you even knowing.

Because the LED is so much larger, the small 2n222a transistors won’t cut it. Instead we have to use some high current MOSFETs. I didn’t have any of my parts drawer so instead I took apart an old ESC.

The Case

Next to begin to work on the case for the remote. I started by standing down an old unnamed mint tin and then wiping off the paint with some paint remover. In a short time I completely remove the paint and I thought the mint tin look pretty cool.

Then I marked where to drill the holes for the screws that will hold the LED in place and center punched the marks.

After mounting the LED I drilled a hole for the push button and secured in place with some moldable Epoxy. The epoxy actually ended up failing later on so I would recommend using some superglue. I also drilled a small hole to push the wires for the LED through and then used a much bigger drillbit to de bur the hole. IMPORTANT: The metal tin will start to cut into the wires and short them out, a short circuit with a lithium polymer battery WILL result in an explosion. The best thing to do is to have a rubber gasket or O ring in place so the wires don’t get cut into. Im only using this for a couple days then taking it apart, so I did cut some corners here.

Wiring

I then started on the wiring part of the project the first step was to connect a battery to a voltage booster and then set the voltage to 5 V. From there I wired push button to pin two and ground of the Arduino. And then soldered the wires from the voltage booster to vin and ground of the Arduino.

Next I wrap the MOSFET gate drain and source with some heat shrink and then use a big piece to cover the entire MOSFET. The MOSFET then gets wired into the Arduino and connects the power source to the LED

After checking that everything was working, The next step was to insulate the electronics and normally I would use some heat shrink but I only had pieces that were too big or too small so I ended up wrapping the entire thing neatly in electrical tape leaving a small gap so you can see the LEDs on the Arduino.

Next is to use the small 3.7 V battery and put it inside the tin. It’s cool that these batteries are out everywhere and there’s a bunch of different sizes and shapes that can fit in almost any enclosure.

But that’s all there is to this project.

Thanks for reading!