How to Hack Together a TV Celebrity Silencer

This might solve the Snookie problem once and for all.

For those of us working from home, television is useful resource for news and monotony-breaking entertainment, but 24-hour a day programming quickly runs out of real content. To fill the remaining hours of space, we get hours and hours of reality TV stars, burnout celebs and the latest annoying non-scandal scandal and other basically pointless information. If your job requires to you keep the TV on it can be maddening having to sift through filler on the way to actual news.

Make Magazine editor Matt Richardson feels the same way. Tired of hearing about “Donald Trump’s feud with whomever or Charlie Sheen’s most recent rant,” he came up with an ingenious solution to the problem that can be easily duplicated with a little effort and a trip to Radio Shack. With a couple of Arduino boards and a Nootropic Video Experimenter Shield, he hacked his TV signal and decoded the closed-captioning transmission track. Then, with an original code linked to a cleverly repurposed infrared LED, the device he built sends a signal to his TV remote that activates mute for 30 seconds, every time certain keywords are spoken.

It isn't a perfect solution. You're going to have a lot of cables running between computer and TV, and closed-captioning doesn't always sync up perfectly, which means, as you'll see in the video Richardson posted to Make, an initial use of the forbidden word might slip past the system. But if you have less than a hundred bucks and some patience, it's a pretty elegant solution to a problem that might otherwise be solved only be throwing your TV out the window.

You can see more, including the specific components and codes, over at Make Magazine.