An Analog TV Station For Anyone

October 25, 2026 by Jenny List 28 Comments

If you’re a collector of older TVs, you’re probably facing the problem in some form of having no transmissions to tune in to. With many sets you can use a SCART or other A/V input, but nothing beats using the thing as it was intended. [BorisDigital] had exactly this problem, and since he worked in a TV transmitter control room in the 1990s, he’s made a small TV station that looks and operates like the real thing.

It’s a 10 inch rack stuffed with goodies, each of which replicates the function of a piece of broadcast gear which would have cost a small fortune back in the day. At the top is a transmitter, a relatively inexpensive board from China. Below it a clock and audio monitor powered by a Pi Pico, then a vectorscope, waveform monitor, and monitor powered by a set of Pi 5s with USB video digitisers, a pair of SD card video record/play units — yet more Raspberry Pi — and at the bottom, an automatic scheduler powered by another fruity board from Cambridge. If you’re not into TV the construction may be worth a second look. Those neat looking rack front panels are 3D printed with different filaments for the lettering, and are both robust and stylish. We can already see how this could be used in our work.

We miss analogue TV, partly because it was a wonderfully intricate technology that, beautifully, just worked. it’s a few years now since we reported on the last gasp of analogue TV in the USA, about a decade after it was turned off where this is being written.

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Keeping Old Wi-Fi Radios Alive With Stream Conversion

October 22, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 13 Comments

There are plenty of Wi-Fi radios out there that were built over the last two decades or so. However, many older models are now becoming less useful because many internet radio stations are switching to newer streaming formats that they don’t support. [Clifford Farrugia] has been working on a little project to save these appliances from the e-waste bin.

The HLS Radio Converter is the result of that work. It’s a small open-source tool that converts modern HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol streams into regular old HTTP MP3 streams that older internet radio appliances are built to decode. You can run the tool on something as simple as an old Raspberry Pi. To make it work, you just give the tool the URL of the stream you’re looking to convert, and it then spits out a new URL to point your radio to which has the stream in the old-school format instead.

It’s a simple tool, but one that should prove very useful if you have a beloved old internet radio that can’t handle modern streams. We’ve featured lots of fun projects in this vein before, too, like this ultra-tiny internet radio build. If you’re working on your own projects in this space, be sure to let us know via the tipsline.

Open Firmware Fixes Dead Onkyo AV Receivers

October 13, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we love seeing hackers replacing the stock firmware on their devices with open source alternatives. Usually this is done because the open firmware offers more features, or lifts some arbitrary limitation. But if you find yourself installing OSIRIS on an Onkyo AV receiver such as the TX-NR717, it’s probably because you’re trying to bring the thing back to life.

As developer [Jokūbas] explains, certain Onkyo receivers that use the Texas Instruments D830 are known to suffer from a very specific failure — the device will power on and appear functional, but no audio will come through. When this happens, it’s either because the D830 itself has failed or the 64 MiB NAND flash chip that holds the firmware it runs is cooked. Unfortunately, replacing either component is a bit more difficult than you might expect.

Everything passes through the Texas Instruments D830. If it goes, you’ve got a problem.

If you swap the D830 with a pin-compatible chip that’s easier to find and less prone to failure, the stock firmware won’t boot. If you try to replace the NAND, you’ll find that the original software is only capable of addressing 512-byte pages, while the flash you’ll find on the market today uses 2 KiB or 4 KiB pages. In both cases, it’s OSIRIS to the rescue.

The open firmware not only supports D830 compatible chips such as the OMAP-L137, but it’s able to address modern NAND flash, making the replacement of either or both component far more practical. With fresh hardware and the new firmware installed, your Onkyo receiver should spring back to life. That said, OSIRIS isn’t feature complete yet, and truthfully the items listed as untested or not implemented on the feature list currently outnumber the entries for what actually does work. But at least it’s a start.

Of course, not all the burned out parts on your Onkyo receiver require a firmware flash to replace. Sometimes a misbehaving unit just needs to have a few of its passive components replaced.

Your CYD Is Now A Telly

September 17, 2026 by Jenny List 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 Tyler August 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 Jenny List 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 Jenny List 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.