[atrain] wants to know if we’ve got any thoughts on things to do with old CRT displays instead of giving them away or recycling them. We’ve seen pic programmers and oscilloscope projects, but even I’m curious to see what you guys have to say.
So, got a better idea? Let’s hear it.
Salvage it to make a lifter power supply see here about that ( http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/lift2exp/index.htm ) or there ( http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/main.htm ) to learn more about lifters…
You could make a real live aquarium/screensaver.
I have a cool idea, but don’t know if it works, a X-ray machine :)
CRTs are shielded, but produce some x-rays.
Accordings to wikipedia, they are allowed to produce up to 0.5 mR/h at a distance of 5cm. A disagnostic x-ray requires about 1.4 mGy, which is about 100mR. So about 200 hours. Of course its not that
simple: e.g. x-rays from CRTs are softer, modern CRT usually produce far less radiation than the limit, maybe its not enough to distinguish it from background radiation ….
But maybe its enough to show the existence of the x-rays to expose a film (for many hours) sticked to the CRT (with some cardboard to shield the light).
If that works: try to reproduce simple pattern cut out of lead foil, or paint patterns with the right input AV-input or oszi-input, and finally try to x-ray some small (thin?) stuff. :)))
Older color CRT should work better, higher acceleration voltage is better (but DONT tweak it to produce more radiation).
Mark, thats my idea for the bondi blue G3 i woke up with the other morning, it’s a long story, went out, had a bit to drink, tripped over the mac in the morning. What’d you know, that wasn’t long at all.
It would be very hard to do, but it is possible a CRT could be converted to a vector monitor. Perfect for playing Asteroids, perhaps under MAME.
You would have to replace all the control circuits, probably with an FPGA and three ADCs (x/y/intensity).
Insert a nano-board and make an all in one pc. Ive seen this done at a local shop. He took a 21 inch Cornerstone and inserted a nano-board along with hd, dvd-rom, etc. He then tweaked the powersupply so the pc and monitor were powered by the monitors power supply. A very cool looking idea. (Yes Mac has already done it. Mac is kinda like the Simpsons. Theve done everything!)
you could use it as a monitor for a MAME or other arcade project. I was planning on using one of my old CRTs to make a Cocktail-table style MAME cabinet.
i was just wondering bout that very thing, and thanks to google found this nifyt project form MAKE
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/08/monitor_hack_high_voltage.html
I think that the aquarium idea would probably be the best idea. Although not the most original, definitely the easiest to pull off for the casual user.
Similiar, could be done with a CRT:
I have a huge old Sony Trinitron commercial TV. The “commercial” implies that it has a huge metal frame around it, and accepts RCA input but with a weird BNC-like connection. Anyways, my brother in law wants me to put it on it’s back so the screen is facing up, and put a glass plate overtop of it, making it a coffee table. Play some cool abstract videos or visualizations and you’re done!
Building on what th0mas said:
coffee table/MAME cabinet???
Like the one where you can play two player sitting down facing your opponent.
I friend of mine is collecting old CRT monitors and televisions in order to make a small tesla coil. IM not sure the exact workings of it but if i understand it correctly he is using the transformer that puts a charge on the front of the glass. He will aqquire as many as he can and connect them in a serise and then use them too release one large high voltage low amperage charge. I will try to post a link to somre more information later if i get it.
… ok I need to work on approving my posts faster…
While in college I would go to thrift stores and purchase old green screen monitors. Apple Monitor iii (yes that’s 3) and even an early Mac. I’d then open them up, cut the wires leading to the deflection coils, and then wire them into either series or parallel (different monitors/axes worked better with one or the other) with the speakers to my stereo.
So basically I made a very inaccurate oscilloscope.
This produced analogue visualizations way before winamp or iTunes did the same. In fact, I wrote an iTunes pluggin a few years ago to simmulate the effect.
I had a Led Zeppelin bootleg that at one point would actually draw a pretty clear guitar on the screen. Unfortunately the instrument being played at that moment was a harmonica, but it was cool.
For those that are less adventurous, if you have an old monitor/tv with a composite (RCA) input you can simply plug in a speaker wire and you’ll get a banding pattern that throbs with the music.
I had two monitors mounted about 12 feet high in my dorm room in college, one throbbing and one doing the oscilloscope thing. People would bring CDs buy to see what they looked like. Ben Harper was always impressive, as was Dark Side of the Moon.
You can use a crt monitor as a HV psu capable of providing about 30 KV, very easy to do. All you have to do is open up the monitor, pull off the the lead with the suction cup connected to the back of the crt (+ voltage) and then use the chassis as ground. Its that easy and also very dangerous!
Use the cap inside to make a coil gun.
I volunteer at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, as a docent and in the Exhibits department. I’m restoring the Ship’s Inertial Navigation Room, and I installed an old CRT monitor in place of a broken CRT screen that displayed navigation information generated by the gyros and an old Univac 642B mainframe. I wrote a JavaScript-based web page that generates fictional navigation data based on the time of day, so now the formerly dead console looks like it’s actually operating.
Whoa, random john, that sounds awesome. Do you have a more specific tutorial on how to do that? Sounds like a great idea.
I always thought it was fun to shoot old tv sets and stuff. There is just a satisfying thing about plinking a tv with a bb gun from 30 or 40 feet away…..
if they’re shallow enough, say 12″ deep, then line a load up and point them at a wall, still hooked into your usual outputs. levoila! Worlds largest ambilight – with extremely good colour reproduction.
OR
Use the shell as a bin.
OR
use the coffee table idea, but hijack the cable and send a slow cycle of white noise through each channel in turn.
I’ve done the same thing John has. The quick and dirty way to do this is to find where the horizontal and vertical coils meet the mainboard and unplug them. plug the horizontal coil into the vertical plug. then attach an amplified audio signal to the vertical coil. it will produce a relatively slow (60Hz) line across the screen (very bright!! turn down the brightness!) and it will me modulated by the audio signal.
keep in mind there are very very dangerous voltages present inside a crt. be careful!!
Cover the screen with a sheet of aluminium foil and attach a wire to the foil with an alligator clip. Hold the bare end of the wire while you turn the monitor on and off.
You get a fun shock!
I have always wanted to take 307,200 monitors out into the desert, lay them on their backs and drive each one as a pixel (640×480). More resolution, more monitors.
I figured on just sending a particular single color to each monitor, but if you really wanted to get fancy and had the horsepower, maybe you could do the photomosaic thing and send images instead.
Since I have many big ideas and even more laziness, I think this is a job for someone else. Any takers?
Make a jacob’s ladder. This guy’s tutorial is pretty solid, but it is very dangerous. http://www.afrotechmods.com/reallycheap/jacob/jacob.htm
We used an oil burner transformer, and I’ve heard good things about neon sign transformers. The middle schoolers lost it when we gave our presentation.
Or if you have a whole bunch of tv’s and monitors, make the jacobs ladders in addition to a tesla coil or a mosquito zapper or something.
I’d make a disco floor with better resolution than lightbulbs.
Get the biggest ones and multi-head them, then dump the lcds.
I can’t stand the viewing angle on LCD’s, I have to keep readjusting the screen. :(
Blow it up and upload the vido to youtube and become famous.
alex,
Note: the following is potentially dangerous. crt screens can hold a big charge for a long time after being unplugged and can serious mess you up or even kill you. what follows does not contain any safety information so if you don’t know what you’re doing then don’t mess with this stuff.
Steve’s description is pretty similar to what I used to do. While I did use the vertical scan signal at times to produce a more traditional waveform, I found that using one speaker to drive the horizontal and one to drive the vertical made more interesting patterns. basically I’d find the wires that go to the two coils at the back of the tube. If they could be unplugged I’d unplug them but sometimes I’d just cut them. I did this on probably 5 different montiors for various people and it was always a bit different.
Anyhow, after cutting the two wires leading to a coil I’d then take a wire leading from my stereo to my speaker ($200 sharp all in one from a big box store, nothing nice) and wire the coil either in series or parallel with the speaker. Sometimes series would work better, sometimes parallel would. Then I’d do the same with the other speaker and the other coil. Again, each coil was different so I might do parallel on one and series on the other. Whatever produced the most deflection without going off the screen. I’d be playing music through it the whole time and turn it on occasionally to test.
So in the end I’d have the left speaker doing vertical deflection and the right speaker doing horizontal. When sound was coming out of both speakers I’d get crazy spirograph type patterns. When sound was mostly out of one side or the other the patterns would be mostly horizontal or vertical. pink floyd would have lots of transitions from one to the other.
The patterns were always very reactive to the music, unlike many visualizers in itunes or whatnot. more volume made for bigger patterns. bass made for big loops, higher tones for tighter loops.
I should note that one monitor I did this to started smoking almost immediately. I assume this is because the power that should have been going from the sawtooth waveform generators to the coils for h and v scan was now not going anywhere. if I had been more sophisticated I’d have measured the resistance of the coils and put resistors on the wires coming out of the board to replace the coils.
Again old Apple ][ and c=64 monitors always worked. I sent a friend a Mac classic modded to plug into his stereo for his birthday and he still has it and it still runs 10 years later.
I am in the process of putting together a website that will host my software projects. I’ll include the iTunes pluggin that mimics the green screen effect and the winamp pluggin that I wrote if I can find it.
Given that my current project combines wiimote head tracking with laser pointer detection for a fps game (I’ve got it all working but need to add polish like explosions) I’m thinking that you might be interested in posting a link to the site when it goes live in a few weeks.
Although some of the comments are interesting, I have actually come up with the most positive use for old monitors…Anger Management.
Videowall is an option
http://www.kiberpipa.org/~igzebedze/cp/vw-howto/
Only in Slovene language but if you need any quick translation I can help :)
i’m surprised that noone has mentioned building a ‘lifter’ yet.
http://jnaudin.free.fr/lifters/lift2exp/index.htm
some of the power supplies for these were taken from old CRT monitors. (Note: the specific link is in french, but most of the site is in english)
we have my $3 diy hv powersupply
http://www.instructables.com/id/reupdated-Simple-flyback-driver/ if u want me to fix the grammer juet shoot me an email to hvhaxor@gmail.com
silic0re the lifter was way back!
lelandwitter u buy the screens, cables, genorator and i’ll carry them and lay then out in the desert and pic the image to go on them. hmmm gotesex!! imagin the astronoughts throughing up in their spacesuites ROLF!!
i hear all the ‘real’ rockstars drop them out of a penthouse window… now post that on utube and u’ll be famous ;D
I’ve taken many broken CRTs apart with a heat gun. Lots of parts to be had.
note that the following hack-a-day link seems to cover what I did 10 years ago but without the spirograph effect:
http://www.hackaday.com/2006/11/05/mac-se-30-audio-visualizer/
I want someone who knows about TV innards to make a howto for hooking RGB signals directly into the CRT driver circuit, bypassing the NTSC junk (like the SCART connector in Europe).
Why? Because (most) game systems output RGB, but with a 15KHz horiz sync that VGA monitors can’t use. Since analog TV’s will be pretty much useless by next year (converter box? puh-lease…) they might as well be converted into (relatively) high quality videogame monitors.
I did what #19 said with a big screen TV after experimenting with a CRT once. I would definitely say be careful with larger displays. I’ve never been tasered before but I probably got a similar sensation lol. You can get some pretty big arcs too with a grounded aluminum can.
Linux on Obsolete Displays: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/lood.html
Basically, through hardware and software hackery, use one VGA output to drive three discrete (greyscale) signals. IMO for stuff like coding, console/server stuff, and word processing, it’s not too terribly bad.
Pretty sure I’ve seen it posted here originally.
In keeping with this idea maybe some projects using old televisions would be good as well.
the digital broadcast switchover means that there will be some good trash pickings coming up very soon in the way of functional television sets thrown out by the rich and the ignorant.
(ghod bless ‘em)
of course you should be careful.
don’t want some damn fool zapping themselves with a flyback.
…or do we?
CRTs can be made into left-right-reversing mirror image displays with ease: All you have to do is reverse the polarity on the horizontal steering coil. The equivalent modification on an LCD monitor requires special DSP hardware or software, I’m pretty sure.
So why would you want a left-right-reversing mirror image display? So you could reflect the image off a mirror, of course, and still have it legible. Why would you want to do that? Well, perhaps to make a teleprompter, or to make a video chat display that puts the camera right behind the apparent screen so that the communicating parties can look directly at the screen and at the camera at the same time.
I’m currently working on some blinkenlights hardware and software using many many monitors as Pixels. but it is not yet ready… Will post it to Hack a day when done.
A project that I’ve wanted to do for a long time now is the ‘All-in-One’ PC using a CRT monitor casing. Removing the actual tube and replacing it with the LCD screen from TFT. Motherboard, drives, PSU etc could then all be mounted internal to the CRT case.
I have to admit, some of the CRT cases I’ve seen have looked really nice (mainly the black and silver).
Alternatively, from the new CRT monitors I’ve had open, there is usually a bit of free space. How about mounting a mini-itx or nano-itx board in the CRT casing?
Use it as a part of an array in a work shop? Or in an office if it is big enough?
Perhaps case mod a PC into it. Or something
#1Show bright white on the screen, put a metal ring around the front with some mesh inside, (so you can see white if you look straight at it). Hang it up high, outside, and night, in the summer time, and attract bugs. then do some basic high voltage hack on the metal ring and screen material so the bugs get zapped.
#2 Use the ultra-high pitched sound those things put off to be like a dog whistle, to call your dogs in for dinner, or to do some kind of dog behavior adjustment. I’m sure they can hear that sound perfectly clear, so you could train them to do stuff based on when they hear the sound. You could wire the AC into a solid state relay (or just hook it up to a DPMS screen saver) to make a computer turn the sound on and off (if say you want your dog to come back inside every night at 7pm)
You could tie a solar panel straight against the screen, and have a program that controls an analog voltage based on the color it displays. You could probably regulate voltage in a very precise way doing that. The frequency would be relatively low compared to even a sound card, but it might be useful for some crazy hack.
Sean:
Ever used that idea as a prank? If somebody doesn’t have the software to flip the screen (like nvidia/intel drivers can do) they will be in trouble, and its simple to pull off.
mike: You can just use a CFL to attract them + 120v grill to fry em’. You don’t need anything more than that, definitely not the many kV inside a monitor. It would be fun I must admit, but such a waste of power.
Quite a few people have mentioned arrays. Is there a way to make an array out of NTSC tv signals? I only have small tvs, and a 2×2 grid of tvs would be awesome :D
One word.
ARCADE
that is all.
Does anyone know if you could make a crt replace a standard arcade monitor?
Make a Squirl catcher like in water boy using the electric fence idea and put sum corn in it
If its still pressurized you have a bomb,
tape some explosives to it or just rig up a cinder block to hit a nail and wammo you have a exploding glass bomb! =)
just my 2 cents
How about a DIY projector? just set the contrast to crazy (may require modding to increase the contrast/brightness enough to be useable) and put a big ‘ol Fresnel lens in front. a little bulky though. (i actually tried that on an old crt viewfinder, small but very low-res.) or you could just gut the control circuitry and make a vector monitor/oscilicope. You could also harvest all the capacitors and make a small emp cannon to ‘test electronic equipment’ (just use an exploding wire in a parabolic reflector)
Dean you site is hilarious!
yeeeah, um, a lot of interesting ideas, and a lot of insanely dangerous ones…
How about a “how-to” on how not not kill yourself freaking around with old monitors and tvs for starters?
by the way, the three best projects for old monitors are the spirograph effect, the O-scope mod (essentially the spirograph effect with some circuitry to make it a lot more accurate) and the reversed image mod (great for teleprompters or game cabinets – reverse the image, reflect off a mirror, the greater the distance between the screen and the mirror, the larger the image).
As far as safety goes: one person mentioned removing the high voltage line from the tube (red line with a suction cup). Please baby jebus dont do this unless you know what you are doing! briefly: unplug monitor (duh) clip a wire to a long flat blade screw driver. Clip other end to the chasis frame of the monitor. slip the blade under and make contact with the connector under the cup. occasionally you may even hear a slight pop.
I always hear people warn of the large caps on the pcb being dangerous. Yeah, they are large, and can give you a snap. what most people fail to mention, is that the tube is the biggest cap of all! it *will* kill you.
If you find a particularly old and beefy crt you could build a single transistor flyback DC high voltage driver from the transformer in it.
Sam Barros at powerlabs has detailed instructions and videos of operation here: http://www.powerlabs.org/flybackdriver.htm
#51, no in most cases. The majority of arcade games sync at 15khz, whereas VGA starts at 30khz (IIRC). Doesn’t work the same way.
Some arcade games, such as those that run on the NAOMI and AtomisWave motherboards, natively output VGA. You can use those!
Hey, old CRTs+speakers make for a nice compact game system setup for Dreamcast, 360, etc. But I think we all knew that.
build an electro kinetic lifter with the transformer part of the circuit. lots of fun high volts!
oops for got the link
http://s95417013.onlinehome.us/ktekx/2.htm
I joked around about it, but MRE is exactly right.
When I started scrounging as a kid I was given a very specific lecture by my older brother about old TVs and how they can kill even after years of being outdoors in a dump and I never forgot it.
Anything posted about working with this stuff should include _lots_ of safety-related information as well.
See this “Largest TV sculpture” in the book of Guinness World Records: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2007/11/071121.aspx and here: http://www.europosparkas.lt/Infomedis/infotree.htm It is not exactly CRT, but why not try to break the record of the geographical Centre of Europe?
This was posted on the Musical Instrument Makers Forum (MIMF.COM) — discharge all high-voltage components, then extract and use the fine magnet wire inside the transformers and deflection yokes to wind pickups for electric guitars.
one word. “trebuchet”
if you don’t know. you need to.
:)
electric car
Right now rather than going out to buy a HD TV or a new LCD monitor, I picked up a VGA Female-Female adapter from a local PC store and am using it for a HD 360 monitor.
would it be possible to turn that old crt into a projector of sorts?
I’ve a couple of dead crt’s that I’ve gutted and turned into bins :-) the perfect thing for a nerd to have in his house.
Just put the front and back sections back together, add some hooks on the inside if you want it to hold a garbage bag and be very careful with the insides of the monitor.. act as if it’s all going to zap you :-P
Wow, lots of really bad dangerous and wasteful uses!
Let me add one by suggesting keeping them as-is (maybe with a power cut-off so an unacceptably high quescent draw of 20W doesn’t pollute and impoverish) and using them by sending your own NTSC broadcasts at them; monitors for VHS stuff you haven’t trashed^Wrecycled, sure, but moreover:
House it high in a corner or center of a room, under cloth dust blinds, where either the front-heavy weight is of some use as >> ballast for a bass speaker
Doh! Monitors; no IrDA, no tuner; use the twisted-pair video Tx/Rx (plus 0-power power-on-when-video-present switching) methods Maxim’s advertising with (and selling via the usual distributors) and add a kenpo-mask kind of thing for the front controls so it’s hardened against mishap.
It’s fine to use it in winter of course if you need the room temperature kept up. With that in mind, may as well attach a few rowing ropes to opposing walls and wire those up to a 64-bit paint program on a some box; you can then paint violently without feeling as bad about it.
If you like NO enough, you could power the monitor and some Jacob’s Ladders (n.b.: that air arc gets hot; have a ceramic ceiling!) off the rowing gearboxes. (Then row or do kenpo.)
Maybe finally sculpt and paint (test compatibility first), dye or antique the cabinet to offer a better matte, comping and facing angles than _| , add light tables to the sides of it, and generally treat it as less deferentially than you did when it was an irreplaceable investment.
Put a big acrylic block over the front and use it as a video cutting jig.
This safety stuff kind of kills it given the logo here; just have someone willing to do chest compressions around (100bpm) in case you forget to bleed a capacitor on that 40″ 2300×1900 CRT you were going to shoot up. Maybe you expect something like the mirror scene from Army of Darkness to happen if you get in there and bust things?
Sorry if anone’s posted anything similar, didn’t seen anything. Anyway, you could use them to make holograms, like the following link shows:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/864238/make_a_cool_hologram_illusion/
But, what I’m thinking is if you keep the brightness settings normal, get some cheap wood and build a cabinet around it (or convert a suitable cabinet), you’ll have your own retro gaming machine, just need to chuck in a joystick and an old console, or better yet an old pc with loads of emulators on.
there is a old peice of software to turn your crt moniter into a am transmitter
Me and my brother built an portible xbox. simely take out the ctr, put in a moderen LCD screen. Simply attack an xbox in the rear, connect (Tight squeeze) then rig up a power supply then boom, portable xbox, perfect for road trips.
Lol…awesome ideas…was well interested in what answers were going to be posted.In my 3rd year studying electronics and computer engineering…already taken on some old computer projects like making old pcs into firewall/spam filter,media server…the likes….
Put up an advert on my uni site saying stuff about it and if anyone had old electronics they wanted to get rid of….one guy offered an old CRT monitor…Lol…had no idea what to do with it and remembered that it stores high voltage even after its unplug…Lol…go a way to go with life so decided not to mess with old CRT monitors :)…
But awesome ideas guys…thanks.
You can break the tube with a hammer and use the electron gun for something.
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You could (carefully) replace part of the front with a thin sheet of metal to create a Lenard Window (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Lenard ). This allows electrons to escape the tube and be used for some purpose. The tube should carry on functioning, so a video signal could be used to control the beam.
Of course, cutting a hole in the front of an evacuated glass tube is not an easy task. I was thinking the most straightforward way would be to score the outline onto the glass, attach the metal over it (eg. using some form of epoxy) then tapping the metal to snap the glass where it was scored; the circle falling backwards into the tube. Would take a lot of prior experiments on glass scoring, metal thickness, material adhesion, etc.
There are tons of things still in perfect condition inside your CRT. If you disassemble the glass off the front of the monitor and reach in the back you will find that CRT monitor was powered by 12 AA rechargable batteries (reuse them). Look to the left of that and remove the Graphics card. You will find that behind the it is a eee Asus Netbook. If you then remove the back cover of the bulb you will find a portable DVD player. Finally remove the motherboard and you will see that there is a Troll guarding the prized possession of a brand NEW iPhone 4. Enjoy! CRT technology was far too advanced for our fathers’ generation.
Chachee sir, you have -almost- made me vomit from the sheer amount of ridiculousness encountered in your post. Good job. Maybe next time I’ll actually throw up on my Asus Netbook. Then I’ll take your advice and gut up that ol’ russian television from the attic. Who knows what I’ll find. Vacuum tubes maybe… ENIAC will live again.
Actually, he’s probably just watched the “VCR Hack” video too many times.
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Well, with enough of them, you could build an array of them, with some appropriately high-tech buttons and keyboards, and call it a movie set.
You might be able to (carefully) salvage the power supply and use it for Hi-V applications like a jacob’s ladder or plasma globe… you might even be able to convert the tube itself, I’m not sure, I’ve never worked with one.