TV-B-Gone is cool, but Gizmodo went overboard

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
by George Appiah

Imagine you’re at the biggest consumer electronics show in the world to demo the next fancy gadget from your company. In the previous night you tested and retested and retested some more… just to be sure everything works ok.

And then just when you start your demo, the TV/LCD screen goes dark. Grrrr. After fidgeting around with buttons, somehow the screen comes back! But you’re not really sure what just happened. You continue your demo…. and moments later, the screen goes off again. And on and off and on and off, with almost rehearsed consistency.

Well, that’s exactly what the kids at Gizmodo, the popular gadget blog, did during the recently ended CES (Consumer Electronics Show). Armed with the TV-B-Gone kit from The Maker Store, these guys just went crazy and kept turning off one screen after another… even during presentations and demos.

And their reason? Just for the fun of it!. Watch a video from their website here.

Below is the TV-B-Gone kit they used. This is a high-power, open source kit version of the popular TV-B-Gone invented by Mitch Altman. If you want to play with this yourself, you can buy the unassembled kit for less than 30 bucks from The Maker Store, and assemble it yourself.