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 Portal. The 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]
This is great. I’d love to have one of these as like a kiosk. One button -> run entire display w/ sound -> back to main screen.
Nit: that display is more like circa 1987.
Neato regardless.
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.
The first time I have seen SPI used to push out fast video, it was in lft’s Craft:
http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/
That’s a very sexy amber monitor but it certainly doesn’t look ca 1972 to me. Nowhere in the given links I could find the date. Is it invented?
I based the date of the monitor from the date of the CNC lathe it came off of (1975).