The Commodore CDTV Brick

This is not my project, I'm just share it for grater visibility. Please consider supporting the original author. The original project is avilable here:

https://github.com/Korinel/Amiga-CDTV-Brick/tree/main

Commodore CDTV Brick was a 1990s CDTV input device that sadly never made it to retail shelves. Instead, it appears that its functionality was integrated into the Commodore CDTV CD1200 (below). The design of this Brick is entirely based on reverse engineering the protocols from the CD1200 Trackball, CD1252/CD1253 mice, Brickette, and the CDTV Remote.

This purpose of this project is to help makers design and build new devices, as the original retro mice, remote and trackerball command heavy prices second hand so there is an eager market for cheaper alternatives, without these input devices the CDTVs I fear will end up in landfill!

The Pico project simply takes joystick input over GPIO, converts it to the IR protocol, and transmits it to an IR LED via a MOSFET. The code in this repro is for the Raspberry Pi Pico, both the RP2040 or newer RP2350 work fine. Visual Studio Code and the Offical Raspberry Pi Pico Extension were used to build the code. Everything is vanilla so should be easy enough to compile. The implementation is intentionally minimal for clarity, to enable ports to other MCUs, but there are known limitations:

PWM vs PIO: It may be preferable to use Pico PIO, as demonstrated in the Pico IR example.

No defensive programming: There is no error handling or debug output—failures may go unnoticed.

Battery conservation: No power-saving measures are implemented. The device does not stop timers or reduce CPU/PWM load during inactivity.

BOM

DE-9 male connector 2x 

Pin Header 1x4 Female 2.54mm

raspberry pi pico (1 or 2)

capacitor 10 uf 16V - Through Hole

Ceramic capacitor 0.1 uf (50V) (104) - Through Hole

Slide Switch 2 Position 3 Pin SPDT 1P2T

1n5817 Schottky Barrier diode 

3AA Battery Holder

100 Ohms Resistors - Through Hole

10k Ohms Resistors - Through Hole

33 Ohms Resistors - Through Hole

IRLB8721 30V Logic Level Single N-Channel StrongIRFET™ Power MOSFET in a TO-220 package

TSAL6200 Infrared Emitter, High Power, 940 nm,