Posted 08.17.2011 at 2:30 pm
8 Comments
Enough Already!
Matt Richardson
It's become a refrain in this age of 24-hour news stations, media-starved talking heads, and hundreds of channels of stuff you don't want to watch. "Why won't they just shut up about (insert your least favorite abusive sitcom star, diminutive bepoofed reality star, brain-dead politician, or Donald Trump here). The talking heads may never shut up, but that doesn't mean you have to listen to them--and some enterprising Makers created an Arduino-controlled gadget that'll make that even easier.
The Enough Already, as it's called, gathers and parses through the TV's closed captioning feed using the Video Experimenter Shield, a toolkit for messing with video with an Arduino (check out more of what the Arduino can do here), searching in real time for the mention of any of those undesirables you'd rather ignore. It can even search for several keywords, which is probably for the best, as once you realize you don't have to listen to everyone, you may want to listen to hardly anyone.
The Enough Already sends an IR command to mute the TV for 30 seconds whenever it sees one of those keywords in the closed captioning. After 30 seconds, it'll turn the volume back on--unless it sees the same name again, which it just might. As the Enough Already is made with all open-source hardware and software, you can make one of your own very easily. Check out the video below to see how it works.
[MAKE]
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or just change the channel!
why learn from your own mistakes, when you could learn from the mistakes of others?
I prefer the other option, not watching broadcast TV unless for weather reports or specific events. :) Its a brain-killing device anyway, turns you into a zombie as TV requires no interaction or control except channel changing etc, so the brain does not get stimulated.
Some people will spend allot of their free time zoned out in front of a TV taking it all in, the brain stores crap just as much as interesting stuff unfortunately.,
If I can use it to shut up Obama that would be really neat.
This is what I heard. "Blah blah blah mute. Blah blah blah electronics. Blah blah blah open-source. Blah blah blah you can order.
If this had been made in Chinese or Latin or even Ancient Egyptian I would have had the same chance of understanding what the hell this guy is talking about.
Change "Charlie Sheen" to "Sarah Palin" and I'm sold!
that sounds useful....
Sounds pretty sweet to me. I would think it would be nice to know when something worthwhile will be on simply by knowing when your TV is not muted. Solves the problem of having so many repeat stories. I wouldn't know how to do it myself, but I'm sure you could get it to filter out repeat stories automatically.
Or you could put in key words from annoying commercials, who wouldn't love muting out those Progressive ads? Or perhaps the rapping hamsters...