Project Vostok
Hello and welcome to my project repo! Here you will find the schematic files and (eventually) firmware files pertaining to my project!
What is Project Vostok?
A few months back, I bought myself a TV-B-Gone (a gag device that allows you to turn off any TV). After having some fun playing around and trolling people with it I had an idea of extending the device to add more functionality.
The device in its original form ejected the IR codes in a sequential mannar, there was no way of selecting the TV to be turned off beforehand. This means that if your TV was at the bottom of the list, it could take up to a minute (!!!) for your TV to turn off. From a trolling efficiency perspective, this is clearly not ideal!
To that end, this project extends the TV-B-Gone in the following way:
- Add headers to allow for a LCD screen to be mounted
- Add a rotary encoder with a push button to allow the GUI to be navigatable
- Use of a bigger microcontroller to allow for more IO Pins and extended functionality
The original design notes for the TV-B-Gone are avaliable here
Licensing
The licence for this project is Creative Commons 2.5
Acknowledgements
These are the people that have helped make this project a reality:
- Mitch Altman - the creator of TV-B-Gone! Obviously without him I wouldn't have had the basis for this project
- Kier Davis - a (great) friend at university who taught me numerous things about PCB design and embedded programming and offered his time and effort into verifying that my design would work as intended!
- ninjafrostpn - another amazing Marine Biologist friend who supported and encouraged me to carry on even when things were slow!
- Professor Steve R. Gunn - Academic at the University of Southampton who designed the LCD board that I used in this project.
- The lab technicians on Level 2 of the Zepler Building at the University of Southampton - these wonderful people helped immensely in sourcing components and providing general help and guidance!