Like many of us of a certain vintage, [Dillan Stock] at The Stock Pot is nostalgic for VHS tapes. It’s not so much the fuzzy picture or the tracking issues we miss, but the physical experience the physical medium brought to movie night. To recreate that magic, [Dillan] made a Modern VHS with NFC and ESPHome.
NFC tags are contained in handsomely designed 3D printed cartridges. You can tell [Dillan] put quite a bit of thought into the industrial design of these: there’s something delightfully Atari-like about them, but they have the correct aspect ratio to hold a miniaturized movie poster as a label. They’re designed to print in two pieces (no plastic wasted on supports) and snap together without glue. The printed reader is equally well thought out, with print-in-place springs for that all important analog clunk.
Electronically, the reader is almost as simple as the cartridge: it holds the NFC reader board and an ESP32. This is very similar to NFC-based audio players we’ve featured before, but it differs in the programming. Here, the ESP32 does nothing related directly to playing media: it is simply programmed to forward the NFC tag id to ESPHome. Based on that tag ID, ESPHome can turn on the TV, cue the appropriate media from a Plex server (or elsewhere), or do… well, literally anything. It’s ESPHome; if you wanted to make this and have a cartridge to start your coffee maker, you could.
If this tickles your nostalgia bone, [Dillan] has links to all the code, 3D files and even the label templates on his site. If you’re not sold yet, check out the video below and you might just change your mind. We’ve seen hacks from The Stock Pot before, everything from a rebuilt lamp to an elegant downspout and a universal remote.
3D printing was made for rapid prototyping and possibly making one-off moulds for making parts.
I know its a tool and everything is free to use it for whatever they want. I understand the urge to make plastic trinkets but come on…
It is not ESPhome that does the magic, it is “home assistant” that does the processing with “automations”.
but… but… where’s the fun of VHS tape rewinding? The joy of watching the tape being pulled into the machine where it wraps itself around the rotating tapehead before it starts to show its magical images, the anticipation of the quality of the recording, the suspense of the answer to the question “did it actually record” followed by 1 hour later by the suspense of “did it record the whole movie or is the tape even long enough, since I recorded it after that other show of yesterday”.
I guess it’s cool to couple an NFC tag to a movie database, but referring to VHS without any of the recognizable similarities other than putting a labelled 3D printed box in another 3D printed box, is a bit of a stretch. It would have been nice to make the 3D printed rectangle look like a VHS tape?
Sorry, for me being so negative… I have fond memories about VHS (V2000 too, Betamax not so much).
You forgot how the pitch of the rewinding gets higher until it finished with a clunk.
if you the video contains:
– lounge music
– too much attention to lighting, DoF and color calibration
– clean space
– face cam for more than 3 sec
you can zap the video, you’ll learn nothing, you are just watching a narcissistic youtubee running for clicks and timeview.
youtube is a plague.
Well, you should be happy to see the project writeup linked at the top of the article! All of the info, none of the youtube.
imo the nostalgia in vhs is embedded in the actual physical thing. when i feel nostalgic, i imagine the shelf i’ve seen at my mother in law’s house that still has every disney movie my wife watched as a kid. i remember standing around in a movie rental shop begging your friends to quit arguing and just pick something. please be kind, rewind. FBI warning that doubles as a gauge for how trashed the tape (or your vcr head) is. did they really make you fast forward through previews? stand-alone vhs rewinders, a staple at garage sales for 20 years.
I did something similar with emulators. Built a PC in the case of a mega drive and 3D printed cartridges with NFC tags that were read by a little app running on the PC. Fun….but impractical.
Please change embedded video to not be automatically translated… it is horrible!
The anachronism of these projects, I never get them. They are like the kids toy with ‘punch card’ dots on them to pick which media already on the machine plays.
For people with dementia this might be a good idea, for anyone else teach them to use the menu, can be as simple as next, and Play key.
Has anyone ever loaded these with more than 128 or 256 media files that a 7 or 8 bit punch card wouldn’t work on?
I get that it is a project so you can work with NFC or RFID, but still don’t get all of the work around the project.
I am way too into how the actual thing works (I guess I rewatched the VCR episode of ‘secret life of machines’ too many times as a kid. Fascinating. A side effect is I am intimately familiar with many of rhe drawbacks and am quick to embrace something that comes along that reduces those. Adding back the hassle to me is wacky.