TV-B-Gone Creator Going Strong With Open-Source Hardware By Dylan Tweney Wired news
March 10, 2009 | 7:15:35 PM http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/tv-b-gone-creat.html? SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The creator of the TV-B-Gone, Mitch Altman, has turned his love of open-source electronic mayhem into a one-man business. His website offers the basic TV-B-Gone, a $20 keychain device with a protruding LED that emits 140 different TV power-off codes, enabling it to shut down 98 percent of all televisions with the press of a single button, Altman says. "The way I see it, it's only fair," Altman says of his infrared light-emitting device. "If a TV shines light at me, I'll shine a light at it. And if it stops shining light at me, I'll stop shining light at it." He also sells a $20 TV-B-Gone kit for do-it-yourselfers who want to assemble the parts themselves, and a $50 TV-B-Gone Pro that looks a bit like a chunky iPhone and has a range of 100 meters. "I used it in the hotel lobby last night," Altman says. "I was trying to get some work done and there were four TVs on, with no one watching them. I aimed it at the two in front of me and all four turned off, that's how powerful it is." Altman's invention, covered by Wired.com in 2004, achieved notoriety last year, when writers from Gizmodo used it to turn off dozens of displays at a time in the TV-saturated booths of CES 2008. Afterwards, Altman says, he made $24,000 in new sales. "I called those guys to thank them personally," he says. But business is, it seems, just a means for Altman to keep doing what he loves most: Hacking electronics. In a workshop Monday on how to build things with microcontrollers here at the Emerging Technology conference, Altman explained the basics of electronics while standing in front of a table littered with blinking, pulsing, glowing, beeping and whirring devices. Many of his hacks, including the first versions of the TV-B-Gone, were built using the MiniPOV3 kit by hardware hacker Ladyada. That kit lets you create ghostly messages with a bank of 8 blinking LEDs, by waving the LEDs back and forth in the air. By making changes to the kit's circuitry, replacing the red LEDs with different colors and reprogramming the included microcontroller, Altman has made not only the TV-B-Gone, but also glowing lights that respond to hand gestures, an electronic "dog" that spins its tail in reaction to sunlight, a 3x3x3 cube of LEDs that displays abstract 3-dimensional patterns, and even a pair of glasses with embedded, flashing LEDs and a pair of headphones for getting your brain waves into a meditative state. Altman is a fan of open-source hardware. The MiniPOV3 kit he uses is open source, and he recently released the schematics and code for his own projects as open source. Altman describes the decision to go open-source as a way of giving back to the hardware hacking community, which was already modifying and improving the TV-B-Gone. "There are thousands of people who are incredibly intelligent and creative helping me, for free, and they love it," he says, describing the benefits of open source hardware. He's also helped found a hacker space in San Francisco, Noisebridge, where hardware hackers (or those who would like to learn more about hardware and software) can gather to work on their projects. "I make enough money to live the life I want to live," Altman says. "And I love this life." -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
