crt

155 Articles

Audio-Forward Case Mod Of Classic 90s Portable TV

April 24, 2026 by 1 Comment

The humble cathode ray tube (CRT) was once the technology behind almost all of our televisions and computer displays. Its replacements, from LCD screens to OLED and others, are generally cheaper to make and better to look at. Old televisions were comparatively large as well, but their size can be an advantage for people like [ManicMods] aka [Jeff]. His latest build ditches the CRT from an old Bently portable TV and uses the huge space available in the case for a hi-fi audio system and some other parts that turn it into an impressive portable home theater system.

After removing most of the internals of the TV, the first part to go in is the stereo and subwoofer combo as it takes up the most amount of space. The subwoofer section points downward and the two stereo speakers are mounted to the sides. To free up the most space inside, the new display is mounted forward of the original bezel, with a new 3D printed one helping to hold it in place. Behind it goes a Raspberry Pi, loaded with the moOde audio player, a high quality DAC for audio output, and a 1 TB SSD with [Jeff]’s uncompressed audio library. Most of the ports are extended out to the case including the SD card slot so other operating systems can be loaded on the Pi, and there are a ton of options for hooking up external speakers and displays as well, making it an extremely modular and expandable portable media center.

Also added to the finished product are a few small game controllers, since the Pi is perfectly capable of playing retro games, as well as a small wireless keyboard and trackpad combo. Although the CRT’s demise will be felt harder by some than by others, the original look of the case is preserved somewhat by keeping the original tuning display and locations of the original control buttons and knobs. If preserving the CRTs are of upmost importance, though, this build used a pair of them in a VR headset.

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An Oscilloscope The Way They Used To Be

March 31, 2026 by 7 Comments

It’s likely that Hackaday has a readership with the highest percentage of oscilloscope ownership among any in the world, and we’re guessing that most of you who fit in that bracket have a modern digital instrument on your bench. It’s a computer with a very fancy analogue front end, and the traces are displayed in software. Before those were a thing though, a ‘scope was an all-analogue affair, with a vacuum-tube CRT showing the waveform in real time. [Joshua Coleman] has made one of these CRT ‘scopes from scratch, and we rather like it.

Using a vintage two inch round tube, it includes all the relevant power supplies and input amplifiers for the deflection plates. It doesn’t include the triggers and timebase circuitry you’d expect from a desktop instrument though, so unless you add a sawtooth on its X input it’s only good for some Lissajous figures. But that’s not the point of a project like this one, because it’s likely even the cheapest of modern ‘scopes way exceeds any capabilities it would have even if it were fully formed. It’s a talking point and an attractive demonstration of a bit of early-20th-century physics, which probably many of us would appreciate if it were ours.

A video of the device is below the break, meanwhile we’ve taken a look in the past at the prehistory of the oscilloscope.

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Analog Video From An 8-Bit Microcontroller

March 21, 2026 by 24 Comments

Although the CRT has largely disappeared from our everyday lives, there was a decades-long timeframe when this was effectively the only display available. It’s an analog display for an analog world, and now that almost everything electronic is digital, these amazing pieces of technology are largely relegated to retro gaming and a few other niche uses. [Maurycy] has a unique CRT that’s small enough to fit in a handheld television, but since there aren’t analog TV stations anymore, he decided to build his own with nothing but an 8-bit microcontroller and a few other small parts.

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Resin Injection CRT Cataract Surgery On Macintosh Monitor

March 21, 2026 by 10 Comments

Nothing lasts forever, but you’d think the leaded-glass face of a CRT would not be a place you’re likely to see Father Time causing failures. Alas, the particle accelerators we all lovingly stared at were very often not unitary pieces of glass: in case of implosion, safety glass was glued onto the front of the CRT. That glue will inevitably fail, as happened to the 20″ Mac-branded Triniton [Epictronics] had with a PowerPC 6100 that needed a few other repairs.

His version of cataract surgery was the most interesting. Usually cataracts are an issue for much older CRTs than the 90s-era Macintosh display featured here, but this particular display was literally pulled out of the trash and not stored well before that, so that’s probably what accounts for its accelerated aging. Usually what people do with CRT Cataracts is use heat to remove the safety glass and failing adhesive. [Epictronics] has a safer technique, however: inject fresh adhesive into the gap that’s forming around the edge of the display.

With a syringe and UV cure resin, he slowly and laboriously goes around the edge of the display to fill in the bubbles that can be reached. Luckily, the delamination on this CRT doesn’t extend very far beyond the edges, so a standard syringe tip could reach all the problem areas.

It looks good now, but if it doesn’t hold, [Epictronics] points out he can still remove the glass with the traditional hot-air technique. We hope it holds up; this is a nice technique to try if you have a CRT with the early stages of cataract delamination. For future reference, it took about one milliliter of resin to fill each square centimeter of affected area, which implies the cataract gap is quite small indeed.

Having repaired the monitor by about fifteen minutes into the video, [Epictronics] spends the remaining seventeen minutes getting the Mac running with its original CD-ROM drive (that needed recapped) and a DOS compatibility card.

We’ve featured [Epictronics] repairs here before, like when he tore down and rebuilt an IBM Model F keyboard. 

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Portable CRT TV Becomes Retro Cyberdeck

March 20, 2026 by 12 Comments

These days, it’s pretty easy to slap together a single-board computer and a cheap LCD screen to whip up a cool cyberdeck fast. But what if you wanna go more retro? [Manu] found a portable TV straight out of the original Blade Runner film, and decided this would be the perfect base for a cyberdeck rocking a whole-ass CRT screen.

The build started with a Panasonic TR-545 television. Back in the day, it took many large batteries to power this thing up—no surprise given how power hungry CRTs are. This gave [Manu] a neat opportunity to sneak all the new cyberdeck hardware into the original battery tray, including a new lithium-ion battery pack that is much more compact than the original. A Raspberry Pi 5 is running the show, computer-wise, and it’s hooked up to an HDMI RF modulator that allows the video output signal to be hooked up to the TV’s original antenna input. It’s not the cleanest way to go, but it allowed [Manu] to make the mod entirely reversible. All the new hardware slots neatly into the repurposed battery tray, and can be removed quite easily without damage to this vintage specimen. Even the keyboard fits nicely into the setup, as [Manu] was able to find a suitable 60% layout foldable unit right off the shelf.

Check out the slide deck for more details on the build, but be warned—it’s a 241 MB PDF. Bonus points if you calculate what that would cost to store on a hard drive in 1979 when the Panasonic TR-545 was on the market. We’ve seen a similar build before, too, with a classic black & white Magnavox unit. If you like squinting at a tiny blurry screen, a CRT cyberdeck is absolutely the way to go. Just be warned that the other screenwriters at your local coffee shop will be more interested in your hardware than whatever you’re actually working on. Good luck with your next pitch all the same. Video after the break.

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Custom VR Headset Uses Unconventional Displays

February 17, 2026 by 16 Comments

Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them being largely replaced by other displays like LCDs and LEDs. They were also difficult to miniaturize, but there were a few companies who tried. [dooglehead] located a few of the smallest CRT displays he could find and got to work putting them in the most unlikely of situations: a virtual reality headset.

The two displays for his headset come from Sony Watchmans, compact over-the-air black-and-white handheld televisions from the late 1900s. [dooglehead] had to create a method for sending video to these units which originally had no input connections, and then also used an FPGA to split a video signal into two parts, with one for each display. The two displays are placed side by side and attached to a Google Cardboard headset, with an off-the-shelf location tracker attached at the top. An IMU tracks head rotation while this location tracker tracks the motion of the unit through 3D space.

With everything assembled and ready to go, the CRT VR headset only weighs in a few grams heavier than [dooglehead]’s modern HTC headset, although it’s lacking a case (which is sorely needed to cover up the exposed high voltage of the CRTs). He reports surprisingly good performance, with notable interlacing and focus issues. He doesn’t plan to use it to replace any of his modern VR displays anytime soon, but it was an interesting project nonetheless. There are some rumors that CRTs are experiencing a bit of a revival, so we’d advise anyone looking to toss out an old CRT to at least put it on an online market place before sending it to a landfill.

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Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round

January 12, 2026 by 56 Comments

If you’ve got a decent CRT monitor, you can usually adjust the settings to make sure the image scans nicely across the whole display. But what if you could rotate the whole image itself? [Jeri Ellsworth] has shown us how to achieve this with an amusing mechanical hack.

The trick behind this is simple. On a standard CRT, the deflection yoke uses magnetic coils to steer the electron beam in the X and Y axes, spraying electrons at the phosphors as needed. To rotate the display as a whole, you could do some complicated maths and change how you drive the coils and steer the electron beams… or you could just rotate the entire yoke instead. [Jeri] achieves this by putting the whole deflection yoke on a custom slip ring assembly. This allows it to receive power and signal as it rotates around the neck of the tube, driven by a stepper motor. Continue reading “Making A CRT Spin Right Round, Round, Round” →