Adafruit TV-B-Gone Kit - Universal v1.2

Dear Friends, this is a great kit! Easily built in about an hour. Works on most TV sets in the restaurants and in the medical office waiting rooms I've tried it at. Very powerful, you can be 50 ft from the TV and it works and you don't have to aim it straight at the TV for it to work. It's very compact and easy to hide. It could use an on/off switch, but I just pull one of the batteries out of the holder. What's funny is that most people don't notice when the TV goes off, which means they weren't really watching them.

This works as advertised! I may or may not have purchased this on a whim after getting tired of hearing a neighbor's TV and weekly UFC Pay-Per View parties. They may or may not have placed a television and surround sound in the backyard adjacent to mine, and may or may not frequently have "guests" over to hoot and holler/scream at the television until 2 am some nights. They may or may not believe now that the TV is broken from being hung outdoors for the past 10 months. Despite my best neighborly efforts to ask them to please be considerate of those that live within 50 feet of them, this only resulted in them noting that they're not loud ever. So anyways I figured I'd try this little guy.I searched for such an item on Amazon and ordered this after skimming the description at 130 AM after being awoken once again. Placed the order and was kind of surprised to get just a bag of parts. Went back and read the description again. Yep. Bag of parts. No worries though. Despite never building anything like this before, I broke out my soldering iron that I use for car audio work. About 45 minutes later I put in the batteries and pressed the button. My TV switched on after a few seconds. Pressing the button again shut it off.It was kind of fun to build and even better to get the results intended. I've tested it from a distance of about 75 feet away and it works great.

Facts: The kit comes with everything required, and the ESD-safe bag it comes in protects the components. Soldering is required, though if you've ever soldered before then this item is relatively easy to do. Pay attention to whether you need to populate the US/EU resistor (which dictates which routine of IR signals you go through) as well as whether you want the ICSP header pins or not (used for reprogramming the IC). Two AAs required, though they seem to last a long time. The module takes around 40 seconds to complete a cycle of all the channels, I believe. Two long-distance and two short-distance IR LEDs are used for transmission. The circuit components are all exposed on the top of the PCB, so be careful not to break them off in your pocket or anything. I am 3D-printing a cover for mine to prevent that from happening.Opinion: A rather fun little device. I've got three jokes running among my friends where I control their TVs and they think something is wrong with their remotes. Take it to a bar or restaurant to turn their TVs off and on. Bear in mind that the cycling of IR signals takes time, and you usually don't know where the signal you need will land in that time-frame. Sometimes a particular "off" signal for a certain TV comes before the "n" signal in the same cycle, so I can click the device button to start the cycle, leave it on a table pointing at the TV, and it will eventually turn the right TV off and then on again by itself. Part of the fun of this is for the circuit-building and understanding experience, though $20+ seems kind of steep for what you ultimately get. I considered building one from scratch but didn't want to deal with the time put into bootloading and coding the IC, but it's a fun and simply kit to have.

Pros:-Easy to assemble.Fun to assemble.Compact - stealthy deployment.Cons:-Needs a power switch (the included button is a cycle reset) - I added another push button (the big one in the picture).The cycle is really slow. It could take 30 seconds or more before all the tv codes have been sent.No case - all of the components are exposed, looks kind of cool though.I had fun making this. It took me about an hour, including setting the bench up and finding / modifying a power switch. Definitely worth the money.

I was skeptical, but this little ATiny Chip is jam packed full of current TV code. I was afraid it would only work on older CRTs from the 80s or something but nope, I soldered the last connection, popped in the batteries and turned off my TV (hey, I was watching that :( lol). I surface mounted my LEDs for easy removal because I have bigger plans for this thing *coughTTLmodulatedIRlasercough*. Anyways. I made a little diagram if anyone can use it to help them assemble this thing. It's super easy to assemble, took me 15 minutes at most. This is a great kit for learning to solder. very low parts count, just need to mind the polarity of the 220uf cap, the LEDs, battery holder, transistors, and most importantly, the little 8 prong chip has a little dot in the corner, that's pin 1 and must face the upper right hand corner respectively to the text as reference. In my pic I put some beefier 2n2222A NPN transistors to the IR LED biasing. The kit didn't come with those, I put those in to handle the experimental abuse I'm going to put this though. lol. Now R2 on the circuit seems to be a pull down resistor for using MOSFETs instead of transistors. I'm still using transistors but I installed it anyways to insure no collector to base leakage when I start messing with higher current IR emitters. Anyways, surely you guessed by now I'm an Electrical Engineer and I can say this device works. The stock IRs are very bright too and have an excellent range.