Tossed That Old TV? Keep the Remote — And Turn It Into a Macro-Capable Custom USB Input Device

Pseudonymous developer "Brisk4t" has released a tool that turns a Raspberry Pi Pico or other RP2040-based microcontroller board into a gadget to repurpose the remotes from scrapped televisions: Tossed The TV — Kept The Remote.

"There are way too many old TV remotes in the garbage dump, and way too many overpriced 'PowerPoint clickers' on Amazon. Its quite appalling," Brisk4t explains of the inspiration behind the project. "All you need is $5, a [Raspberry Pi] RP2040, and five minutes to turn that old, suspiciously sticky TV remote into a fully functional USB keyboard/clicker/thingy that you can reprogram on the fly like your favorite hackerman keyboard."

The idea of hanging an infrared receiver off a microcontroller to pick up signals from TV remotes, among other IR-speaking things, isn't new — but Brisk4t's project aims to take it to the new level with an easily-accessible programming interface inspired by the VIA mechanical keyboard firmware project.

Running in-browser, the editor lets you record the transmissions generated by your remote for each keypress and then assign them to USB keyboard keys, media controls, or custom actions. Given that a TV remote typically has fewer keys than your average computer keyboard, there's also support for layer-shifting — allowing one remote button to perform multiple independent actions depending on what other buttons have been pressed. There's even an RGB LED, designed to provide feedback as to the currently-selected layer, and support for multi-step or chorded inputs.

The source code is available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, along with precompiled binaries for the Raspberry Pi RP2040.