I remember them clearly from my childhood. Clever as can be.

I had one in my room growing up. Sometime around 1990 I think. Naturally, the TV was much older, probably late 70's? We certainly used to keep TVs much longer than today...

That's in no way ultrasonic. They were quite common in the '50s & '60s. Then came the wired remotes.

Coming from a big family, I loved wired remotes. They could never get lost. Once we got wireless remotes, they were never around. It was not that unusual to find them in the bathroom... or in a car...

It operates around 38KHz, so >20KHz, so ultrasounds.
Watch the video. The guy measures its frequency/wave length.

60s, I suppose?
I had *never* heard of any such thing We (meaning my family) just went from using knobs on TV sets until 70s, to IR remotes around 1980s, maybe a couple of years before that.
I seem to remember there were some radio remotes in the market, which we never had in our household, however.

Our first remote was able to change the channel/volume through walls.

Of course, it had 3 buttons: Channel (cycled the channel up), volume up, volume down. You turned the TV off by turning the volume all the way down.

I like to tell my kids how easy they have it. When I was their age, I had to walk 8 feet thru shag carpeting to change the channel.

I wonder... ours had solid metal bars in it hit with a kind of piano hammer mechanism, only more violent. The bars were like 15mm diameter x maybe 30 to 50 mm long, loosely held in rubber. They sounded exactly like the one in the vid. I could definitely hear the different tones for the 4 buttons.

Indeed, the one in the vid uses bars just like you describe.

The audible tones you heard were likely to be something akin to harmonic overtones (or whatever the opposite of an overtone is). Each of those bars is like a bell. And like any musical device (bell, string, drum head, whatever), they likely generate a large complex swath of frequencies, only a portion of which are audible by the human ear. The TV set's electronics were tuned to pay attention to only the specific harmonic overtones which were the right ultrasonic frequency, with the lower (human-audible) frequencies being ignored.

Oh, you poor baby. When I was a youngster, we never got to change the channel at all because there was only one TV channel on the air. KIEM-TV, Eureka, California.

I just checked - they're still broadcasting 66 years later.

Yes, I really am that old.

tanstaafl.

Oh, you poor baby. When I was a youngster, we didn't even have a TV.




(Of course, that had nothing to do with my age, but surely, that's beside the point...)

I have this blurred memory from when I wasn't even in primary school, of watching the original Dr. Who with my 4-year-older sister on a small black and white TV, without a remote but with a broken knob to switch channel (we had two) and an antenna cable in the back of it that was constantly giving us troubles. I was mesmerized by the Daleks, which looked incredibly similar to a moka coffee pot, which I ended up getting from the kitchen to play.

Not sure how old this makes me appear. But, fun memory.

Ah, of course!!

I just knew those guys resembled something from the kitchen!

I think Italy had only two (national) TV channels until the 70s. Not sure when they added the third channel. In the 80s we had private TV channels, few broadcasting nationwide, and a plethora of them were just local.

Anyway, this is actually the very same coffee pot, most likely. It has been in my parents' house in the mountains since before I was born, so there it is. The best Dalek proxy I had as a child.
OKIMG_5963 by Claudio Marinangeli, on Flickr

So was the handle the front, or was the spout the front?

I think the handle might have been the toilet plunger, retracted.

I actually have a small breakout board here but haven't got around to putting my project together.

Basically, I have a SONOS BEAM which is attached to the ceiling by the projector screen, the BEAM accepts optical via a dongle which imitates a ARC endpoint, however, running optical from the projector to the beam is not entirely feasible, and because it's mounted o the ceiling the channels are swapped.

Currently I solve this problem using a raspberry pi and a hifiberry to pipe the bluetooth sound, but I'd prefer for the audio to come from a HDMI source (Nvidia shield).

This makes the whole thing a bit of a mess.

My plan is to take the HDMI output from the shield (I have obtained the HDMI specs) and then inject the digital audio into the beam directly by pretending to be an ARC device, this will allow me to also swap the left and right.

I did the preliminary work on faking an ARC endpoint (both as the source and the sink), I just haven't had the time to sit down and do the actual real work device.