Tiny TV Celebrates The Forgotten Tech Of CRTs

February 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 35 Comments

For those of us who grew up before the Internet, the center of pretty much every house was the TV. It was the shrine before which we all worshipped, gathering together at the appointed times to receive the shared wisdom of mass entertainment. In retrospect, it really wasn’t that much. But it’s what we had.

Content aside, one thing all these glowing boxes had in common was that which did the glowing — the cathode ray tube (CRT). Celebrating the marvel of engineering that the CRT represents is the idea behind [Matt Evan]’s tiny desktop TV. The design centers around a 1.5″ CRT that once served as a viewfinder on a 1980s-vintage Sony camcorder. [Matt] salvaged the tube and the two PCB assemblies that drive it, mounting everything in a custom-built acrylic case, the better to show off the bulky but beautiful tube.

The viewfinder originally used a mirror to make the optical path more compact; this forced [Matt] to adapt the circuit to un-reverse the image for direct viewing. Rather than receiving analog signals off the air as we did in the old days — and we liked it that way! — the mini monitor gets its video from a Raspberry Pi, which is set to play clips of TV shows from [Matt]’s youth. Rendered in glorious black and white and nearly needing a magnifying glass to see, it almost recaptures the very earliest days of television broadcasting, when TVs all had screens that looked more like oscilloscope CRTs.

This project is a nice homage to a dying technology, and [Matt] says it has spurred more than one conversation from people you grew up knowing only LCD displays. That’s not to say CRTs are totally dead — if you want to build your own old-school TV, there’s a kit for that.

Modern Features In Classic Radio

December 7, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 53 Comments

As consumer electronics companies chase profits on tighter and tighter margins, it seems like quality is continually harder to find for most average consumer-grade products. Luckily, we don’t have to hunt through product reviews to find well-built merchandise since we have the benefit of survivorship bias to help us identify quality products from the past that have already withstood the test of time. [Tom] has forever been fond of this particular Sony TV/radio combo from the ’70s so he finally found one and set about modernizing it in a few key ways.

Among the modifications to this 1978 Sony FX-300 include the addition of a modern color display, Bluetooth, an upgraded FM radio, and a microphone. At the center of all of this new hardware is a Teensy 4 which [Tom] has found to be quite powerful and has enough capabilities to process the audio that’s being played in order to make visual representations of the sound on the screen. He also implemented a bitcrusher filter and integrated it into the controls on the original hardware. He’s using an optimized version of this library to cram all of that processing ability into such a small chip, and the integration of all this new hardware is so polished that it looks like it could be an original Sony stereo from the modern era.

While some may complain about restomod-type builds like this, we don’t really see any need to be arbitrarily or absolutely faithful to bygone eras even if the original hardware was working properly in the first place. What works is taking the proven technology of the past and augmenting it with modern features to enjoy the best of both worlds. Much like this hi-fi stereo which blends the styles and technology of the 90s with that of the 60s in an equally impressive way.

Sinclair Pocket TV Teardown

October 11, 2021 by Al Williams 27 Comments

A pocket-sized TV is not a big deal today. But in 1983, cramming a CRT into your pocket was quite a feat. Clive Sinclair’s TV80 or FTV1 did it with a very unique CRT and [Dubious Engineering] has a teardown video to show us how it was done.

A conventional CRT has an electron gun behind the screen which is why monitors that use them are typically pretty thick. The TV80’s tube has the electron gun to the side to save space. It also uses a fresnel lens to enlarge the tiny image.

Continue reading “Sinclair Pocket TV Teardown” →

A CRT Monitor Restoration

September 16, 2021 by Al Williams 22 Comments

Nothing quite says vintage computer like a dedicated glass terminal. We enjoyed [Adam]’s restoration of an Acorn CRT monitor. The 14 inch display had a common problem: a defective power switch. Replacing a switch shouldn’t be a big deal, of course, but these old CRT monitors have exciting voltages inside and require special care.

One common issue, for example, is the fact that the old CRTs are really large capacitors and can hold a dangerous charge for some time. The easiest way to handle the potential problem is to make sure the device is unplugged, ground a screwdriver blade, and push the blade under the second anode cap. Most of the time, nothing happens. Once in a while, though, you’ll hear a loud pop and you just saved yourself a nasty shock.

Even though the actual repair was pretty mundane, the teardown was a great nostalgia trip and while we don’t want to give up our LCD, we do like the old glass. CRTs have a long history and came a long way before their last gasps. They even took a turn as mass storage devices.

Shipping A CRT: Lessons Learned

April 29, 2021 by Chris Lott 75 Comments

Old CRT computer enthusiast [x86VileR] recently tracked down an IBM 5153 monitor for which he had been searching several years. Unfortunately shipping a heavy glass CRT isn’t easy. In fact, it took [VileR] three tries to get a functioning monitor delivered intact and working. The first one seemed reasonably protected in its packaging, but arrived so banged up that the CRT had become dislodged inside the monitor and the neck broke off! The second attempt was packaged even better, and he was sure it would arrive problem-free. Alas, it too arrived all banged up and broken.

This one clearly had superior packaging, so I find it difficult to account for this truly stupendous level of damage. The most promising theory is that several people jumped on it simultaneously, just before the delivery truck ran it over. As my friend put it, it would’ve arrived in better shape if he had just smashed it himself before boxing it up.

Double-boxing appears to be the answer, although it might result in a box too large to ship depending on your courier’s rules. Short of building custom wooden crates, do you have any packing tips for shipping heavy and fragile items? Thanks to [J.R. Dahlman] for sending us the tip.

A Modern Mac Using An Ancient Mac Display

April 24, 2021 by Jenny List 8 Comments

If you own an Apple product you probably live in a world with a few proprietary interfaces, but by and large your displays and desktop peripherals will use familiar ports such as USB and DisplayPort. For the Mac owner of yore though it was a different matter, as [Dandu] is here to tell us with the tale of a vintage Apple monochrome CRT monitor and a modern Mac.

There are no handy VGA ports to be found in this screen, instead it has a 15-pin D connector following a proprietary interface. With the right adapter it’s easy enough to produce VGA from the modern machine, but while it is in theory possible to map VGA pins to Apple pins there’s a snag with this particular model. Instead of using separate sync pins, it demands a composite sync of the type you might find in an analogue TV set that contains both horizontal and vertical sync pulses. The solution came through a simple transistor circuit, and then with the requisite settings on the modern Mac to deliver the 640×480 resolution it was possible to see a MacOS Catalina desktop on something more suited to a Mac II.

We’re more used to seeing CRT Macs in the form of the venerable SE/30, a machine that’s been on our radar for a long time.

MicroLEDs: Lighting The Way To A Solid OLED Competitor

April 12, 2021 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

We’re accustomed to seeing giant LED-powered screens in sports venues and outdoor displays. What would it take to bring this same technology into your living room? Very, very tiny LEDs. MicroLEDs.

MicroLED screens have been rumored to be around the corner for almost a decade now, which means that the time is almost right for them to actually become a reality. And certainly display technology has come a long way from the early cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology that powered the television and the home computer revolution. In the late 1990s, liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology became a feasible replacement for CRTs, offering a thin, distortion-free image with pixel-perfect image reproduction. LCDs also allowed for displays to be put in many new places, in addition to finally having that wall-mounted television.

Since that time, LCD’s flaws have become a sticking point compared to CRTs. The nice features of CRTs such as very fast response time, deep blacks and zero color shift, no matter the angle, have led to a wide variety of LCD technologies to recapture some of those features. Plasma displays seemed promising for big screens for a while, but organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have taken over and still-in-development technologies like SED and FED off the table.

While OLED is very good in terms of image quality, its flaws including burn-in and uneven wear of the different organic dyes responsible for the colors. MicroLEDs hope to capitalize on OLED’s weaknesses by bringing brighter screens with no burn-in using inorganic LED technology, just very, very small.

So what does it take to scale a standard semiconductor LED down to the size of a pixel, and when can one expect to buy MicroLED displays? Let’s take a look. Continue reading “MicroLEDs: Lighting The Way To A Solid OLED Competitor” →