Retro Hardware Mash-up Spouts Archaic Geekery

This delightful little box is something only a hacker could love. It uses some second-hand hardware to display random sayings attributed to [Buckminster Fuller]. The image above doesn’t do the display justice. There are other photos which show very crisp lettering which is easier to read.

[Autuin] always keeps his eyes open for cool gear at the end of its consumer life. The screen for this project is a CRT from a Coleman TV lantern (you know, for camping… bah!). It finds a home in the chassis of an old non-functional radio he had picked up a few years earlier. With those parts in hand the real adventure started: getting an Arduino to read in quotes and generate a TV out signal to display them.

We love the SD card holder which he fashioned from a card-edge connector he grabbed at the local electronics store. From there he scoured the Internet for help on where to patch into the TV signal. Once the right trace was discovered the Arduino TV out library does the heavy lifting.

15 thoughts on “Retro Hardware Mash-up Spouts Archaic Geekery

    1. ahh well sorry about that :)
      being an old tv repair engineer it was my first thought..

      i have just sent 150+ crt tv’s from the late 70’s and 80′ and 90’s for recycling here in the uk

      (old hire stock)
      i will try and get a pic of the pile up somewhere for a giggle..

  1. Was this made at the Victory Electromechanical Factory in Oceania? Another option would be to make it into a real TV by replacing the aruduino with an ATSC converter box in the case.

  2. Cool hack! I’ve got a little portable B/W TV I’ve had since I was a kid, of roughly similar dimensions, lying around here somewhere… an Arduino-driven game of Life might be fun on it. Thanks for giving me another idea to add to the project list…

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