With a little creativity and a willingness to do some DIY tinkering, you can turn an old Google TV remote into something far more interesting than a forgotten piece of plastic. Its buttons and infrared capabilities can be repurposed to interact with computers, microcontrollers, and even other electronics around your home. You don’t need to follow the original design of the remote, either. Here are three projects that can give that old remote a new purpose.

As someone who is constantly on their computer, be it for work, projects, or gaming, there are a ton of tedious things that I have to do frequently. A lot of people use macro pads, programming a couple of keys to execute specific shortcuts. If you have an old Google TV remote you’re no longer using, you can convert it into a macro pad by programming some buttons to run shortcuts instead. As long as you’re not afraid of a little DIY, it is a pretty easy project to execute, giving you a quirky alternative to a generic set of shortcut keys.

Amal Mathew over on Instructables put together a project where you can utilize any remote that emits an IR signal as a macro pad. You’ll need an Arduino Pro Micro or Arduino Leonardo, an IR receiver, and some jumper wires. It is important to note that you can only use boards based on ATmega32U4, as it makes the Arduino recognizable as a mouse or keyboard.

Also note that not every button on Google TV remotes sends out an IR signal. It uses a combination of Bluetooth and IR, and only some buttons send an IR signal. This limits it a bit, but you can still set up a reasonable number of macros.

ESP32 boards are small, inexpensive microcontrollers with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making them useful for DIY projects that need to react to wireless inputs or control other electronics. Instead of adding physical buttons to a homemade device, you could use the remote to trigger different functions. With an IR receiver, the ESP32 can read signals from a TV remote and assign actions to individual buttons, making it pretty easy. Again, with a Google TV remote, you’ll need to figure out which buttons transmit usable IR commands.

A neat tutorial over on Programming Electronic Academy showcases how you can achieve this. The basic project requires an ESP32 development board, an IR receiver module, jumper wires, a breadboard, and a Google TV remote, plus a computer running the Arduino IDE to program the ESP32. Connect the receiver to power, ground, and one of the ESP32’s GPIO pins, and use the open-source IRremote library to decode the remote’s signals. You can then run a simple program that displays the codes received from each button in the Arduino IDE’s Serial Monitor, identify the codes you want to use, and assign an action to each one.

You can turn an old TV remote into a surprisingly useful wireless light-switch controller with a few inexpensive electronic components. The project uses the remote’s infrared signal as the trigger, so you can press a button from across the room instead of installing a conventional wall switch. If you have a Google TV remote lying around, this is a great way to give it a second life. The project could also be adapted for other low-voltage devices, such as LED strips, small lamps, or other electronics that you want to control remotely.

Courtesy of jaknieper23 on Instructables, this project has gotten a lot of eyes. The basic setup requires a TV or Google TV remote, an IR receiver, a microcontroller such as an Arduino, a relay module, a breadboard and jumper wires, along with the appropriate power supply and light/load. You first connect the IR receiver to the microcontroller and use it to identify the code transmitted when you press a particular remote button. You can then program the microcontroller to activate the relay whenever it detects that code, allowing the remote to switch the connected light on or off.