Raspberry Pi Smart TV

November 20, 2013 by 25 Comments

[Tony] decided his “smart” LED TV wasn’t quite smart enough. So he stuffed a Raspberry Pi in it.

Upon opening the case of his 40″ Hisense Smart LED TV, he discovered that the logic board actually had two unused USB pads — what luck! He tapped off of them to get 5V @ 500mA to power the Pi… Later on he realized this wasn’t the ideal solution — when the TV turned off, it cut the Pi’s power too. So he pulled out his multimeter and probed the board, this time finding a 5V source that remained on while the unit was plugged in.

Next up was the placement of the Raspberry Pi. The included speakers on this particular TV weren’t that good, and since [Tony] uses a surround sound system anyway, he decided to make use of their space better. Cutting out the grill and removing the whole assembly left him with more than enough room to store the Pi and mount a 3D printed LAN and USB port cover!

He’s running Raspbmc which lends the TV tons of functionality. If you don’t mind voiding your warranty, this is a great hack!

Rebuilding A 1940s TV

October 18, 2013 by 30 Comments

TV

There’s a lot of cool stuff to be found under piles of trash in an antique store. [dijt] discovered this when he found a tiny 7″ Motorola television from the 1940s under a stack of trinkets from earlier eras. We can understand [dijt]’s impulse buy, and the trials of rebuilding this ancient TV more than qualifies it as a hack.

If you know where to look, there are hundreds of resources available for old televisions, Hi-Fis, and radio equipment from the dawn of the electrical era to the modern day. After consulting with a few forums, [dijt] got his hands on a schematic for his television set and began work on diagnosing what was wrong with it.

It turned out the original ballast tube in this set had long since given up the ghost. Luckily, this is a common problem in old TVs, and after consulting some forums [dijt] had a schematic to replace this ballast tube with some newer caps and resistors.

After constructing the circuit and testing it out, [dijt] mounted it in the old ballast tube to replicate the original look and feel of the 1949 television. Interestingly, this is the second time this TV had been restored; the 1960s-era caps and resistors told [djit] this TV had once went into a television repair shop. Let’s just hope [djit] remembered to glue the schematics to the inside of the chassis this time.

SSTV Beacon Based On A Raspberry Pi

October 6, 2013 by 17 Comments

The Budapest hackerspace did some joint work with a local ham radio club and created an SSTV beacon housed inside a CCTV case that takes an image of its environment and transmits it using slow-scan television over ham bands.

As the title says, the build uses a Raspberry Pi to process the image taken from its camera and then transmits it over the air using a Ricofunk UHF transceiver with a main frequency of 433.425MHz. On the software side, PySSTV is used to convert images to frequency/time tuples, UNIXSSTV then creates the actual audio file and finally sox plays it. To avoid screwing up the Raspberry SD card, every part of the filsystem is either mounted in read-only mode (things like /home and /usr) or uses a ramdisk (things like /tmp and logs).

The plans, schematics and source code are available, so they hope that other hackerspaces will join the ranks!

Raspberry Pi Media Center On An Apple TV

October 3, 2013 by 8 Comments

You may tend to think of the AppleTV as a sort of walled garden, and you would mostly be right. Apple keeps tight control over what runs on their devices. That said, [David] decided to look closer at how the various ‘applications’ work. It turns out, the applications are nothing more than glorified web plugins. Using XML and Javascript, the apps simply define library function calls, giving them a consistent interface. So using fairly simply methods, the options really open up. Unfortunately, the method for adding new sites isn’t enabled by default.

Using a jailbroken AppleTV, [David] was able to do a fair bit of detective work and found a way to enable the ‘Add Site’ option, which allowed him to use his Raspberry Pi as a media server. The good news: you don’t need to jailbreak if you’re running 5.2 or 5.3… you should be able to recreate his success fairly easily. The bad news: things seem to have changed in 6.0. [David] isn’t sure if this was Apple intentionally closing a hole, or just not dotting all of their i’s.

[David] put all of his research up on Github, including the rough code. If you haven’t updated your AppleTV yet, and you have a Raspberry Pi to use as a media server, give it a try and let us know how it goes in the comments.

Change The TV Channel Over IP

August 16, 2013 by 11 Comments

tv-channel-change-over-ip

[Mustafa Dur] wrote in to tell us about his hack to control the television with a smartphone. Now the one-IR-remote-to-rule-them hacks have been gaining popularity lately so we assumed that’s how he was doing it. We were wrong. He’s using his satellite receiver to provide the Internet connection. It pushes commands to his LG 47LH50 TV which has an RS-232 port.

The image above is the back of another LG television (it came from a forum post about controlling the TV with a PC). [Mustafa] is using a Dreambox DM800 satellite receiver which also has a serial port an he can telnet into it. He searched around the Internet and discovered that it should be possible to connect the two using a null modem cable. His initial tests resulted in no response, but a tweak to the com port settings of the box got his first command to shut off the television. After a bit of tweaking he was able to lock in reliable communications which he made persistent by writing his own startup script. From there he got to work on a Python script which works as the backend for a web-based control interface.

If you want to find out what else you can do with this type of serial connection read about this hack which used a script to try every possible command combination.

HDTV Antenna Of A Different Color

July 16, 2013 by 15 Comments

We’ve seen our share of commercially available HDTV antennas that work really poorly. For at least four years now we’ve gone without cable television, using a coat hanger antenna we made ourselves to record over-the-air broadcasts. But it’s a pretty ugly beast — we’re lucky enough to have an attic in which it can be hidden. If you’re in need of free television and don’t want an eyesore of a an antenna try building this foil and cardboard version. Even it if doesn’t work at all you’re only out about ten bucks.

The expensive part is the matching transformer which converts screw terminals to a coaxial cable connection so that it may be connected to your HDTV. You’ll need a few nuts and bolts, but we assume you can beg, borrow, or steal the tin foil, cardboard, and glue that round out the parts list. Glue, measure, cut, fold, fasten, finished! You’ll be watching horrible summer TV in no time!

If it doesn’t perform as expected just reuse that connector and try your luck with a fractal antenna.

Plex Hack Runs Apple TV Without A Jailbreak

June 5, 2013 by 28 Comments

Apple has been keeping a tight leash on the third generation of their Apple TV hardware. Not only has it stood up to every attempt at a Jailbreak, but they don’t allow 3rd party applications through the app store like the other iOS hardware does. The second generation hardware was a popular platform for XBMC. It required a jailbreak to load the home media software which is why it can’t be done on the newest box. But here’s an alternative. This hack uses DNS redirects to make Apple TV 3 a Plex frontend.

Instead of putting new software on the Apple TV this uses a separate computer to intercept its web traffic. You aim your Apple TV DNS at the computer running the script, then use the native Movie Trailer app, which will be populated with movies and TV shows from your Plex backend. All other functionality will be retained, making for a near-perfect solution. For more info on the system check out this forum.

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