home entertainment hacks

823 Articles

Your CYD Is Now A Telly

September 17, 2026 by 7 Comments

The Cheap Yellow Display is an all-in-one ESP32 board with a touchscreen, that’s as the name suggests, cheap. It’s appeared in a great many projects since it emerged from the depths of AliExpress, and today thanks to [Nickm324] it takes the turn of becoming a mini TV.

The tiny TV project world is one of successive developers building on previous works to deliver their own refinements on the idea, so this one borrows heavily from an earlier ESP32 project. Its twist on the idea is a single button interface using the CYD’s BOOT button. It supports a range of “channels” of which each one is a different piece of media played from the SD card. As far as we can see it’s only able to play synchronised .mjpeg and audio files, probably a shortcoming of the older ESP32 found on the CYD. The photo features a rather cutesy retro 3D printed TV case which annoyingly isn’t linked from the repository at the time of writing.

It’s a nice idea, and the CYD makes it as easy as possible with minimal wiring. Yes it’s a novelty, but we’re guessing there could be many non-novelty applications for it too. It’s certainly not the first such project we’ve seen, here’s an earlier one.

Is This The Year Of The Linux… Television?

September 6, 2026 by 52 Comments

The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn’t been on its way for quite as long as nuclear fusion plants, but somehow it seems to recede into the horizon at just about the same rate. Every year, it’s another year in the future. You know what isn’t a desktop? A television. [Haggis on Toast] makes a case that while there may be barriers to desktop adoption, there’s no reason not to use Linux for a set-top box, and shows one such build in a recent YouTube video.

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The Days Of Broadcast Digital TV Could Be Numbered

August 25, 2026 by 61 Comments

When the analog TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for North America, and DVB-T for Europe and other places. This would deliver a multi-channel broadcasting solution for the future, and this would be how those not on a cable would consume their telly. It’s a surprise then to find that some governments are already looking at turning off digital TV broadcasting, with the UK in particular wanting to put a date on the switch-off of 2032.

It’s been no secret for many years that linear broadcast TV is being overtaken by streaming services, and this move projected to come at the end of the transmitting contract was always likely to come eventually. Even with increasingly few younger people watching traditional TV though, it still comes as a bit of a shock that it’s happening so soon. The replacement will be an online service for which initially a set-top-box will be required. We’re guessing there will be a storm of protest, but since it’s still quite a few years away and broadband coverage is now near-universal, there’s a good chance it will peter out as the time approaches.

Aside from the end of analog TV, we’ve seen a steady decline in AM and Long Wave transmission across Europe. What makes this surprising then is that instead of being a legacy analogue system, the one facing the turn-off is the future-proof replacement, and one that still sees plenty of use at that. A major shift in consumer electronic technology is taking place, but will anyone notice it?

Header: Carlos Adampol Galindo, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Fixing A Dodgy Cheap Audio DAC

July 9, 2026 by 14 Comments

One of the attractions of buying at the bottom end of the electronics market by mail order from China is that you never quite know what will come your way. Sometimes it’s a diamond in the rough, while with others it’s a mess. Occasionally along comes something which should work but doesn’t, and that’s the moment when you wonder if you could fix it. [Nyanpasu64] had just such a device, an HDMI to VGA converter with audio that didn’t work. What could be wrong?

The HDMI to VGA chip has an onboard audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and it’s a delta-sigma design. This type of DAC is frequently used in audio applications because it works by shifting its switching frequency many times higher than the input sample rate, thus reducing considerably the distortion. This one wasn’t performing as advertised though, and the problem turned out to be that switching frequency being all over the output. Clearly the filter wasn’t working, which led to the design of a new filter. The write-up is therefore an extensive dive into filter design, and in part also a discovery of the effect of impedance on them.

For a super-cheap module to cause so much work, one might ask why not simply spend a few more dollars and get a better one. But had they done that we wouldn’t have seen this write-up, so we’re sticking with team cheap.

We’ve looked at audio DACs, in the past.

Mechanical TV, Without The Benefit Of New Parts

June 29, 2026 by 10 Comments

There are many experimenters who have had a go at a mechanical television, and though there are a few challenges, it’s a relatively straightforward project in 2026. A hundred years ago though it was still beyond the cutting edge of technology, and that’s where [Paul Kocyla] is placing his build. It’s a mechanical TV system, using only parts that would have been available in the 1920s. The project isn’t finished yet, but we suggest following along for some fascinating insights into developments in early electronics.

As it stands he has a wooden chassis, a period power supply and amplifier, a synchronous motor, and of course the Nipkow disk that makes it all possible. The electronics aren’t quite finished, and he’s yet to source a neon lamp. This last part may be particularly tricky, as there were specific flat-plate neon lamps made for this application. It’s interesting to find that the motor would synchronize to the grid frequency and would need to be restarted a few times for the frame to be in the right place.

His last posting contains a particularly interesting nugget of information for anyone using tubes. The amplifier carries a 120 Hz hum, something difficult to trace. The culprit is the early tubes with directly heated cathodes formed from the heaters themselves; they had such a low thermal mass that they would “blink” at 120 Hz if fed with AC. A set of period copper oxide rectifiers solve this by feeding DC to the heaters. There’s a YouTube series to follow, and we’ve placed the most recent one in which he fixes the power supply, below the break.

Back in January, we marked the hundredth anniversary of mechanical TV’s invention. Meanwhile, some of us have been known to experiment in this direction too.

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Make Your Own Loudspeaker From Scratch

June 28, 2026 by 6 Comments

A loudspeaker is a vital component of every device that plays sound, but while its operation is simple, it’s a surprisingly difficult device to build. [Rvanderouderaa] has made an Instructables post showing a speaker design that it’s claimed, had an impedance that varies by volume (Dutch language, Google Translate link).

In all moving-coil speakers, a coil of wire is held in a radial magnetic field. To this is attached a cone, and when a current is passed through the coil the whole thing moves to create the sound. The tricky part of making one comes in making the cone itself, and in particular the suspension system that holds it in place while allowing it to move backwards and forwards. It’s normal for these components to be moulded from thick paper.

This design uses a 3D printed frame and cone, with the 3D printing providing excellent rigidity. The suspension system is a circular corrugated sheet, and it’s made in this case using papier-maché made from wet toilet paper, and a 3D printed mould. We particularly like this technique.

This is an impressive build, simply for having made a recognizable and working speaker in the first place. There’s no demo video so we have no idea how it sounds, but for us the point is more in the construction than the reproduction.

If speakers interest you, we’ve taken an in-depth look at them in the past.

Make That Smart TV Into A Computer

June 25, 2026 by 23 Comments

The smart TV is a fixture in most houses, variously an entertainment portal, corporate data gathering tool, or sometimes an outright spy. It’s a nice monitor with a computer built in, so can that computer be released to do something else? It’s a question [Xen’on] is answering, on an Android-based TV.

The guide is not too different from many others relating to Android phones, with a few quirks. An Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connection is established, root access is gained using Shizuku, and then it’s a case of installing a more conventional Linux front end with the Openbox window manager through Termux. There are some TV-specific things to do with handling power cycles, but the TV is now a usable Linux box.

It’s always good to see someone retrieve the Linux underneath a locked-down device, but the system spec tells the real story. By the looks of things this TV is a few years old as it had an Android version that’s a bit long in the tooth, and thus it also packs an aged version 4.x kernel. Couple that with a more seat-of-your-pants experience compared to a regular distro where many of the annoyances are taken care of, this isn’t an easy route to a trouble free desktop. Instead it has a lot of potential for making the TV what it was intend to be, an entertainment device. Merely one that gives much more software freedom.

Meanwhile, this isn’t the first Termux guide we’ve seen.