When the neighbors plays there TV to loud at 3am

[The_Welding_Library_Guy]

so for the past few nights ive been waking up to the neighbors true crime shows blaring loud enough that I can hear it in the bed room. a whole road and house away. So after being woken up tonight I decided I would go in the shop and tinker around a bit. As im pettling on the computer. Trying to decide what to do. I notice I can see the offending tv through the window above my bench. After watching Cold Case Files for a bit. I got a little board. I had already seen that episode so a few ideas and some googling later. I found a sketch for an Arduino based TV-B-Gone. So I threw this together and have been truing off the poor saps TV for the last 30 min. He is now behind the tv doing what I can only assume is wiggling wires about "trying to fix it"

[bd139]

Good good. Make ‘em suffer! 

[jbb]

Sounds good.

Can you run a wire from your workshop to a button on your bedroom wall?

[The_Welding_Library_Guy]

LOL I think the voltage drop might be to great to trigger the code. But I did have the thought of integrating a microphone to trigger the code if it detects X db for X amount of time

[Ian.M]

Great minds think alike. 
Automate it:  add a parabolic directional mike, and an OPAMP preamp  and envelope detector feeding an ADC input. 

[The_Welding_Library_Guy]

So I am still fairly new to the DIY electronics world. I built this off of someone elses work. But I havent done much with transistors before. So can someone help me understand this a bit better?. My understanding of how this works is when Pin 2 is grounded out it trggers the borad to start cycleing through the TV remote codes. Its my understanding it does this by going high low on Pin 3. Witch is ran to the transistor. Why couldn't I just wire the IR leds directly to pin 3? Is there something I am overlooking?

~thanks

[ZigmundRat]

I don’t know which exact circuit you are using, but typically the transistor would be used to allow the IR LED to be supplied with more current. If you drive the LED directly from the micro pin you will be limited to maybe 40ma max for example (whatever is spec’ed for the device) and limited to the micro supply voltage. The external transistor frees you from these restrictions.

[The_Welding_Library_Guy]

Ok. So essentially the transistor is usually used in a similar way to a relay?

[Stray Electron]

  Good start. For your next project you should built a high power amplifier for an IR control. Then you'll be able to turn their TV off an on of change the channel at will.   That should break them of the 3 AM TV habit. Just imagine turning on his TV and on the Porn channel just as his wife gets home from work, or better yet, when his mother in law visits.

[NivagSwerdna]

If you narrow down the IR code that actually works on his TV you can determine the set of codes that you can play with.

I think Volume UP continuously on would be quite effective

[george80]

Had neighbors that used to have the TV Stupid loud when I was a teenager.
I took great pride in my marksmanship skills with my air rifle in being able to shoot the Antenna cable off  in surprisingly few shots.
I must have done that 20 Freaking times till they must have given up on TV all together and we never heard it again and the antenna cable never got repaired.


I had a Mongeral neighbour at my last place That caused us a lot of Grief but I think I got my revenge.
All their bedrooms were on my side of their house.  I got my 2 Big PA Speakers and put one at the front of the house and one in line with the rear.  Hooked up the big amp and had some fun. Downloaded all these sound Files and would play them about 30 Min after the last light in the place went out. I'm a night owl anyway and the bedrooms in my place were on the other side and the wife and Kids never heard it/ slept right through.

The stereo effect was great so the sound of a far off steam train coming closer  was most realistic and with the Big Sub woofer sitting on some boards that rattled, it really did sound like the orient express coming through at 2:30 in the morning.  I had the chopper coming in, The ships fog horn but I think my favorite was the sound of the cattle drive.  Right in the middle of suburbia that never got old or less funny.

Made up a bunch of sound files with different delays and different sounds  and could load one into the computer and then have it play  all night with sounds at different intervals.  Never kept me awake but it sure did them.
The guy was illegally using the house for Business purposes and there were always cars coming and going and even parking right in my driveway.  During the day I had placed some tweeters on top of the fence aimed right outside the window where the guy had the business set up.

I looked up what the most annoying frequency to the human ear was, downloaded a frequency generator on an old phone and set that Going at substantial volume just before I left the house.  What hours of that a day must have done to them I can only imagine let alone the harm it must have done to his business  At other times I would usually play aboriginal Didgeridoo music or by daughters modern version of heavy metal whatever is called Now... Defqon type stuff. 

I asked one of the other neighbors if they ever heard the sound effects at night and if it was annoying them at all. The guy said he could hear it if he was awake lying there but don't stop it, he would lie there pissing himself laughing which would wake his wife up and they would both laugh themselves back to sleep knowing where it was coming from and who would have been really copping it.
They were on the other side and couldn't stand this mongeral either.

I knew I had got to the bastard when he wrote a Letter to the local council  saying he " Begged" them to do something about the " Inhumane" sounds I was making and could they please do something about the Cattle I was keeping in my yard at night That would be my almost 1/4acre block in the heart of Suburbia and stop the noise from the trains passing by..... Where there were no tracks within 1800M of our properties. 
Man did I laugh when I read that one.

My wife who worked at the council intercepted the letter and made me a copy.  The guy in charge looked at the address, looked up the owners and recognised my wifes name. He came and asked her if we were keeping cattle in our back yard?  My wife forgetting about the sounds just looked at him and said What? and the guy said yeah, I thought that was about it and showed her the letter.
She said Don't know what he is talking about, how the hell would we get cattle in and out the place and we never hear the trains, the station is too far away.

They wrote back to the neighbour saying there was no cattle being kept on the premises and nothing they could do about the railway noise although they very much doubted if he could hear trains at 3am because none ran on that line at that time.

The next thing with the sound effects which I had great fun Finding all manner of new ones from Lions and Tigers which were pretty scary out of the blue, thunderstorms that went for an hour,  to ocean liners and railway crossing sounds as well as jet Planes and endless emergency services. Next off was to shine LED driving lights in the windows at Random Times.  Another letter and I got a " Please explain" Phone call.  I said I had put in automatic security lights due to the late comings and goings of vehicles from next doors illegal business clients and  problems I had with damage and missing items in my front yard.

No problem with that and reply went back to neighbour that I was allowed to have security Lights and that was it.

Gave that guy all I could till after I moved out even. Left the gear in place till the day we handed over.

[ZigmundRat]

@The_Welding_Library_Guy yes, that’s the idea. It allows you to control a larger load. Of course as an electronic device you need to pay attention to the data sheets.  There are a lot of texts out there on interfacing microcontrollers you can reference.

[texaspyro]

There was a guy selling P60 format high-power flashlight modules that have the TV-B-GONE code in them driving a 10 watt IR LED a few years ago on budgetlightforum.com

I bought a couple.   I have tested it at 100+ yards.   Also tested it in a sports bar with like 100 TVs... with it in my jacket pocket it , pointed at nothing, it killed them all.

[Ian.M]

If you've got a good enough view of it to be able to see the screen with binoculars, there's so much more *fun* you can have if you are certain all the neighbours have gone out.  e.g. if you can ID the make and model (or at least range of models), its worth googling to see if it has a hotel mode and if you can enable it without physical access.   Hotel mode typically lets you set the max volume and restrict changes to the available channels.  If not, you can at least delete whatever channel their show's on so they'd have to retune to get it back, and if you also enable parental controls it will probably block retunng, though that's a little obvious.   

[Stray Electron]

I had a Mongeral neighbour at my last place That caused us a lot of Grief but I think I got my revenge.

   Damm George, that's CLASSIC! I laughed my ass off!

[Hydron]

I did enjoy the revenge stories, but any particular reason why the guy deserved the train noises etc? I'm assuming it's not due to ethnicity!

We have some neighbours with a habit of getting drunk and playing 80s/90s anthems loudly till the early morning, but if it's an issue banging on their door normally provides immediate results and an apology the next day - they're good people but just don't think before acting. I've been known to have loud hobbies too so can't be too pissy about things. On that note, I can recommend a decent sized tesla coil as a device capable of waking the dead (and any living neighbours in a fair radius)

[dmills]

Back in the CRT era we had a problem with next doors late night football parties....

Well the telly was in the living room by the fireplace and backing onto the party wall, so I just decided that if they were going to keep me up yelling about football, I was going to spend the time practising my 2AM stick welding, with the BIG welding set with the 30M arc cables.

Turns out that if you coil the arc cables up in about a 1.5m diameter coil and prop it up next to the fireplace, then run a bead @ 250A or so every time the noise ramps up you sometimes find the telly in the street the next day with a boot thru the screen, who knew?

Regards, Dan.

[texaspyro]

There is a story about a guy using a TV-B-Gone on his neighbors.    A week later there was a nice TV out on their curb for recycling      Apparently they thought it was defective and just bought a new one.

[David Hess]

We ran a big neon sign transformer driven spark gap tesla coil for Halloween once (1) and discovered later that it was jamming TV, FM, AM, and even cable for a couple of blocks.

A couple hundred watts of 6 meter or sometimes 2 meter AM through a directional antenna does wonders to audio power amplifiers.

(1) Only once.  It was so terrifying that kids would drop their candy and run crying down the street.