Controlling A TV With A Microcontroller

Here’s two builds that print text to a TV with only two pins:

Still Alive with an Arduino

After seeing all the builds that play Still Alive, [Bob] decided to take a 1972 amber monitor and recreate the cut scene at the end of PortalThe build uses the TVout library for Arduino. There were a few problems with running the Unix and Still Alive animations at the same time, so [Bob] flips a bit in the EEPROM at the end of the command line animation and restarts into GLaDOS’ report. You can check out the old school color monitor here

ATMega Video Text Generator

[Stian] didn’t think his build was good enough for Hackaday, but his friend [Mikael] thought otherwise. [Stian] wrote a library to generate an NTSC video signal in real time. It’s a text-based build with 37×17 character resolution and only requires about 3kB of RAM. As a bonus, it only takes up two pins on [Stian]’s ATMega128.

You can check out the videos for both these builds after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGnu4YTLhco&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbCXDgIpuw8&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PU8UWDMPlY&w=470]

5 thoughts on “Controlling A TV With A Microcontroller

  1. Arduino/AVR video generation has been around for a while, but I’ve only seen it as pure bit banging. I thought a UART or other serial port might be a more versatile solution if it supported the right mode with no framing bits; Kudos to Stian for choosing the SPI port and making it go.

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