Published February 25, 2017 © LGPL

TV - Time Machine

This is a Raspberry Pi enabled old-fashioned TV which plays Old TV clips in a loop.

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Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

Enough to play videos with quality.

15.6" LCD for UDOO DUAL and QUAD

Actually I used a Dell monitor I got from a thrift store, just removing it from its frame.

Speaker: 3W, 4 ohms

Again: I used a PC speaker I got from the Thrift Store, then disassembled

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Laser cutter (generic)

to cut the wood panel where I placed the speakers, to trim the transparent acrylic and to cut the round frame from the white acrylic which goes in front of the Monitor

3D Printer (generic)

Used to print the Knobs (volume and channel)

Story

I was always fascinated by black & white TV's but finding one in good conditions is both hard and very expensive. That's when I decided to build my own TV.

While this is not the "real deal", building it was a blast. I joined a local Maker community (Snohomish County Makers in Everett, WA) and they helped me with the wooden cabinet building part.

Electronics here are the easiest part, this is basically a Raspberry Pi 2 playing videos in an infinite loop from a flashdrive, a monitor and a PC speaker.

The Video Looper code is from Adafruit: https://learn.adafruit.com/raspberry-pi-video-looper?view=all thanks Adafruit!

There are thousands of old time videos free for download at https://archive.org/

Customizable knob SCAD files are availabe here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:54024

The nice looking speaker fabric is from Amazon (look for Speaker Grill Cloth Fabric Silver Turquoise Stripe) even though this is not actually Fabric. It is plastic but it works great, you can trim it using a soldering iron...

Here you can see how I attached the monitor, the power bar, the Raspberry pi, the volume potentiometer and the "channel" switch which does nothing in this V1, maybe n a next version...

This is a short video showing the TV in action. I can't really keep it on close to me because I'll stop working to watch... :-)