What kind of TV do you have? An older 720p model, or the now standard 1080p? Perhaps you’ve made the leap to the next generation, and are rocking a 4K display in the living room. All those are are fine and dandy if you just want to watch the local sportball contest, but where’s the challenge in that? With all the technology and modular components we have access to anymore, nowadays all the real hackers are making their own TVs.
Of course, when [Nikolai] built his very own LED TV, he did have to make a few concessions. For one thing, there’s no tuner on this model. Oh, and there’s the small issue of only having a 16×16 resolution. It might not be your idea of the perfect display, but it’s just perfect for his newborn son.
That’s right, [Nikolai] got his entry for the “Hacker Parent of the Year” award in early, and built an LED display for his son that he’s calling “BabyTV”.
Rather than the shows, trash, advertisements that they play on the kid channels, this TV only shows animated characters from retro games. We’ll concede that this project might be an elaborate Clockwork Orange style attempt at hypnotizing his son to instill an appreciation for classic gaming. But we’ll allow it.
To make his BabyTV go, [Nikolai] used a 16×16 WS2812B LED panel and an Arduino Nano. Two rotary encoders are used to allow adjusting brightness and change the character currently being shown on the screen. As a particularly clever hack, the Arduino has an IR sensor attached and is constantly watching for any signals. If an IR signal is detected, the BabyTV switches to the next image. So if Junior has a standard IR remote in his hands, any button he presses will cause the display to change to the next “channel”.
Historically speaking we haven’t seen much stuff for children here at Hackaday, but 2018 seems to be changing that. Recent projects like the incredible scratch built mini excavator and gorgeous AT-ST high chair would seem to indicate we’re currently witnessing a generation of hackers become parents. Don’t panic folks, but we might be getting old.
Love it! Add some audio and knobs a kid could turn and they could even play with it!
It’d be amusing to build a 16:9 display with a similar resolution to this one and give it an HDMI input. Let it do the best it can to display a 1920×1080 image on a 48×27 display.
For true 16:9, shouldn’t the display be 16×9 pixels? ;-)
I still watch TV in glorious 576i on a lovely CRT that gives out that nice 15kHz whine. And I still record movies to VHS. Even from the internet. Taped off Youtube. Jep, I’m retro.
You monster.
Replace the colour LED’s with light bulbs to go further back in time to black and white TV.
When I was in middle school I set up a tiny 5″ 320×240 color CRT TV to a plug and play in my loft bed. It was a lot of fun.
Nice, but been done before with a better looking enclosure https://ledseq.com/product/game-frame/
Sure, it’s similar and there are also other projects like that. But this one is open source and all the plastic parts can be printed, STL files are available. $249 for the game-frame where you can’t use your own animations, is something not everybody would like to spent.
This is really cool! Ive never seen this! Thanks for the review!