hdmi

90 Articles

Wii U RetroPie Console Looks Gorgeous

November 1, 2016 by 8 Comments

What to do with your broken gaming consoles? Gut it and turn it into a different gaming console! Sudomod forum user [banjokazooie] has concocted his own RetroPie console from the husk of a WiiU controller — an ingenious demonstration of how one can recycle hardware to a perfectly suited purpose.

[banjokazooie] actually used an original shell for this build, but if you happen to have a broken controller around — or know someone who does — this is a great use for it. A Raspberry Pi 3 is the brains of this operation (not counting [banjokazooie]), and it features a 6.5″ HDMI display, a Teensy 2.0 setup for the inputs, a headphone jack with automatic speaker disconnection, dual 3400 mAh batteries, an external SD card slot, and a lot of hard work on the power supply circuit — although [banjokazooie] reports that the hardest part was cutting to size a custom PCB to mount it all on. The original plan was to see if the idea was possible, and after a three month effort, it appears to work beautifully.

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DEF CON: BSODomizing In High Definition

August 6, 2016 by 36 Comments

A few years ago, [Kingpin] a.k.a. [Joe Grand] (A judge for the 2014 Hackaday Prize) designed the most beautiful electronic prank ever. The BSODomizer is a simple device with a pass-through connection for a VGA display and an infrared receiver. Plug the BSODomizer into an unsuspecting coworker’s monitor, press a button on a remote, and watch Microsoft’s blue screen of death appear. It’s brilliant, devious, and actually a pretty simple device if you pick the right microcontroller.

The original BSODomizer is getting a little long in the tooth. VGA is finally dead. The Propeller chip used to generate the video only generates text, and can’t reproduce Microsoft’s fancy new graphical error screens. HDMI is the future, and FPGAs have never been more accessible. For this year’s DEF CON, [Kingpin] and [Zoz] needed something to impress an audience that is just learning how to solder. They’ve revisited the BSODomizer, and have created the greatest hardware project at this year’s DEF CON.

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HDMI Extender Reverse Engineered

June 9, 2016 by 41 Comments

[danman] has been playing around with various HDMI video streaming options, and he’s hit on a great low-cost solution. A $40 “HDMI extender” turns out to actually be an HDMI-to-RTP converter under the hood.

He’d done work previously on a similar extender that turned out to use a quirky method to send the video, which he naturally reversed and made to do his bidding. But non-standard formats are a pain. So when he was given a newer version of the same device, and started peeking into the packets with Wireshark, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the output was just MPEG-encoded video over RTP. No hacking necessary.

Until now, streaming video over an IP network from an arbitrary HDMI output has been tricky, [danman] has been more than a little obsessed with getting it working on the cheap. In addition to the previous version of this extender, he also managed to get a stream out of a rooted Android set-top box. That costs a bit more, but can also record at the same time, should you need to.

None of this solves the HDMI HDCP encryption problem, though. You’re on your own for that one.

(Those of you Wireshark wizards out there will note that we just swiped the headline image from the previous version of the project. There were no good images for this one. Sorry about that.)

Hackaday Prize Entry: Adding HDMI To Small Displays

May 27, 2016 by 16 Comments

LCDs come in a lot of sizes, and there’s a lot written about pushing pixel data out to larger displays. Smaller LCDs, like the 4, 5 and 7 inch variety, aren’t used much, because no one seems to know how to drive the things. For [Joe]’s Hackaday Prize Entry, he’s creating an open source interface for tiny LCDs, making it easy and cheap to add one to everything with an HDMI port.

[Joe]’s Open LCD Interface comes on two boards, with the first providing connections to an LCD, all the power circuitry required, and a bunch of pads to break out every IO line. The second part of the puzzle is a decoder that takes HDMI signals and drives a small LCD.

HDMI decoders are nothing new to the world of hobby electronics – there are multiple projects that give the BeagleBoard a display through HDMI. Even Adafruit sells one of these converters. [Joe]’s board has another trick up its sleeve, though: it can give any microcontroller a high-resolution display, too.

There’s another module that connects to [Joe]’s breakout board that turns the LCD into an SPI display. This means any microcontroller can drive a high-resolution display. It’s fast, too: in the video below, [Joe]’s SPI display can push pixels at least as fast as any other microcontroller-based display we’ve seen.

It’s a great project, and a by opening up the doors to millions of cheap LCDs on eBay and Alibaba, [Joe] has a great entry for the Hackaday Prize on his hands.

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VGA In Memoriam

January 29, 2016 by 117 Comments

The reports of the death of the VGA connector are greatly exaggerated. Rumors of the demise of the VGA connector has been going around for a decade now, but VGA has been remarkably resiliant in the face of its impending doom; this post was written on a nine-month old laptop connected to an external monitor through the very familiar thick cable with two blue ends. VGA is a port that can still be found on the back of millions of TVs and monitors that will be shipped this year.

This year is, however, the year that VGA finally dies. After 30 years, after being depreciated by several technologies, and after it became easy to put a VGA output on everything from an eight-pin microcontroller to a Raspberry Pi, VGA has died. It’s not supported by the latest Intel chips, and it’s hard to find a motherboard with the very familiar VGA connector.

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Video Standards Are More Than Video Signals

November 19, 2015 by 78 Comments

The number of hours we spend staring at screens is probably best unknown, but how about the technology that makes up the video on the screen? We’ve all seen a reel-to-reel projector on TV or in a movie or maybe you’re old enough to have owned one, surely some of you still have one tucked away real nice. Whether you had the pleasure of operating a projector or just watched it happen in the movies the concept is pretty straight forward. A long piece of film which contains many individual frames pass in front of a high intensity lamp while the shutter hides the film movement from our eyes and our brain draws in the imaginary motion from frame to frame. Staring at a Blu-ray player won’t offer the same intuition, while we won’t get into what must the painful detail of decoding video from a Blu-ray Disc we will look into a few video standards, and how we hack them.

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Digging HDMI Out Of UDP Packets

November 4, 2015 by 24 Comments

[Danman] was looking for a way to get the HDMI output from a camera to a PC so it could be streamed over the Internet. This is a task usually done with HDMI capture cards, either PCI or even more expensive USB 3.0 HDMI capture boxes. In his searches, [danman] sumbled across an HDMI extender that transmitted HDMI signals over standard Ethernet. Surely there must be a way to capture this data and turn it back.

The extender boxes [danman] found at everyone’s favorite chinese reseller were simple – just an Ethernet port, HDMI jack, and a power connector – and cheap – just $70 USD. After connecting the two boxes to his network and setting up his camera, [danman] listened in to the packets being set with Wireshark. The basic protocol was easy enough to grok, but thanks to the Chinese engineers and an IP header that was the wrong length, [danman] had to listen to the raw socket.

Once everything was figured out, [danman] was able to recover raw frames from the HDMI extenders, recover the audio, and stream everything to his PC with VLC. All the code is available, and if you’re looking for a way to stream HDMI to multiple locations on a network, you won’t find a better solution that’s this cheap.