Confronted with a monitor that would display neither HDMI signal, nor composite video, [Joonas Pihlajamaa] took on a rather unorthodox task of getting his oscilloscope to work as a composite video adapter. He’s using a PicoScope 2204 but any hardware that connects to a computer and has a C API should work. The trick is in how his code uses the API to interpret the signal.

The first thing to do is make sure the voltage levels used in the composite signal are within the tolerances of your scope. [Joonas] used his multimeter to measure the center pole of the RCA connector and found that the Raspberry Pi board puts out from 200 mV to 2V, well within the PicoScope’s specs. Next he started to analyze the signal. The horizontal sync is easy to find, and he ignored the color information — opting for a monochrome output to ease the coding process. The next big piece of the puzzle is to ascertain the vertical sync so that he knows where each frame starts. He got it working and made one last improvement to handle interlacing.

The proof of concept video after the break shows off the he did. It’s a bit fuzzy but that’s how composite video looks normally.

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