High-power TVBGone

This TVBG has been done a long time ago, but I never took time to write about it. It’s quite powerful : you can easily take off TV’s at 100ft, and even works thru your pocket (and pretty far if you wear GoreTex). But guess it, with power comes batteries, and the downside is it’s size, roughly the size of a cigarette pack (all the pictures below are pretty outdated…).

TVBGone with it

The design is pretty simple : an AtTiny85, 6 TSAL 6100 IR diodes from Vishay (rated 1A for short pulses), 6+1 NPN transistors. Unlike what is show in the picture below, there is no more jumper (it was used to switch between programming mode and run mode). The tantalum capacitor has been scrounged, and not bought. If you know what coltan is, you know that buying tantalum stuff is rather bad.

TBGone bottom viewTVBGone with it

The thing is powered by 3xAA batteries. There is no current limiter, the only limit is provided by the batteries internal resistance so take care if you want to change supply for a LiPo or whatever, you’ll blow the LEDs for sure. In this case, add a resistor along each LED, or better, use some current regulator.

For now, the 6 TSAL LEDs are sucking 2.5 Amps without a current limiter.

TVBGone top view

The AVR code has been found on the net, and is provided here almost unmodified. The original authors are in the main.c header file, among which, of course, Limor (aka Ladyada).

I’ve changed the IR codes a bit, removing some duplicates, reordered them too so the most used codes comes first (file with modified codes is PERSOcodes.c).

One of the problems is that LG TV can not yet be turned off. This is a pain since LGs are everywhere. I don’t have time to reverse engineer timings for LG or use convert Lirc codes for now. But for sure, this would be valuable work. If you do it, please drop me a note.

EDIT : CaitSith2 dropped a note saying he has more up to date code for TVBG which turns off LGs too (see comments). So you’d better use his code than mine. Thanks CaitSith2 !

EDIT2 : It seems that CaitSith2 is more high power : 8 TSAL6100, 4xAA… nice !

In the schematics (tvbgone2_cms), all the little pads near JP1 are for a very weird slide button (I was too leazy to draw an eagle lib part). So don’t panic and adjust for your switch.

There is another schematic included : tvbgone_mini.sch, which is a variant intended to be build as jewelry. I plan to use CR2477 batteries but I never built it. If you make it, please tell me how things turned.

The P & R pins are « Program » and « Run » respectively. When done programming, just cut the wire going from the central pad to P, and make a solder bridge between the central pad and the R pad. If you need to reprogram again, remove bridge, and bridge between the central pad and P, etc…

Get the eagle schematics, grab the code, turn off those TVs and have fun.