CRTs Are Too Mainstream, So Game On A Mechanical TV Instead

May 12, 2026 by Tyler August 17 Comments

Aside from nostalgia, people claim to like CRTs because they’re apprehendable– the technology just makes more sense than the arcane wibbly-wobbly solid-state madness going on inside the driver chip of your new OLED. CRTs weren’t the first technology used to display moving images though, and their mechanical forebears were even easier to understand. For that reason we suppose it was only a matter of time before one of The Youths– in this case a British YouTuber by the name of [smill]–tried gaming on a mechanical television display.

The game in question was Minecraft— because of course it was, that’s the new generation’s DOOM–and the mechanical TV in question is not a priceless 1920s antique but a commercial kit that reproduces [John Logie Baird]s 1925 televisor. If you’re not familiar, it uses a flat disk– called a Nipkow disk after its inventor– with a series of holes in a spiral to demodulate a single lamp’s brightness variations into monochrome image made of scan-lines. As you might imagine, the resolution depends both on the size of the disk and its speed, so with a tabletop example you’re not going to get much– in this case, 32 holes for 32 lines. At least they’re not interlaced this time.

Getting a video signal from the computer to the LED in the televisor kit was the hard part of the hack. Aside from actually playing on the diminutive monochrome display, that is. There is a “video2NBTV” tool that can do the job, as the Narrow Band TV signal used by amateur radio enthusiasts still has the compatible timing values and modulation as what the televisor kit uses. We suspect that’s because the Televisor people used the modern NBTV standard as a starting point for their electronics, since [Baird]’s device reportedly ran 30 lines at only 5 frames per second, compared to the 32 lines at 15 FPS here.

Some of you may turn your nose up at this as a mere YouTube stunt, which is fair enough. At the same time, we cannot wait for the eventual arms race. Imagine when someone decides to go for 4K cred? Staring through a supersonic Nipkow disk makes pointing a particle accelerator at your face downright mundane. The kit [smill] used was monochrome, but if you want to repeat his antics in glorious colour, you can 3D print your own TV.

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One Hundred Years Of Telly

January 26, 2026 by Jenny List 13 Comments

Today marks an auspicious anniversary which might have passed us by had it not been for [Diamond Geezer], who reminds us that it’s a hundred years since the first public demonstration of television by John Logie Baird. In a room above what is today a rather famous Italian coffee shop in London’s Soho, he had assembled a complete mechanical TV system that he demonstrated to journalists.

Television is one of those inventions that owes its genesis to more than a single person, so while Baird was by no means the only one inventing in the field, he was the first to demonstrate a working system. With mechanical scanning and just 30 lines, it’s hardly HD or 4K, but it does have the advantage of being within the reach of the constructor.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Baird and his system is that while he was able to attract the interest of the BBC in it, when the time came for dedicated transmissions at a higher resolution, his by then partly mechanical system could not compete and he faded into relative obscurity. Brits instead received EMI’s 405 line system, which persisted until the very start of the 1980s, and eventually the German PAL colour system in the late 1960s.

So head on down to Bar Italia if you can to raise a coffee to his memory, and should you wish to have a go at Baird-style TV for yourself, then you may need to print yourself a disk.

Header image: Matt Brown, CC BY 2.0.

Television Built From A Tin Can

July 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

A tin can and string telephone just doesn’t impress the kids anymore. Luckily, now you can turn that tin can telephone into a television, as [aussie_bloke] over on the Narrow-Bandwidth Television forum showed us.

[aussie_bloke]’s tin can TV is a mechanical television, a TV where the scanning lines of a CRT is replaced with a spinning disk with very small holes.(if you have a better analogy in this day of LCDs, tell us). Instead of the usual Nipkow disk, [aussie_bloke] used a small tin can.

The image displayed on this TV isn’t very large; there are only 30 scan lines and the pattern of the holes results in a display 10.5mm in width by 7.85mm high. Basically, this display is microscopic but it’s still very impressive.

Sure, you may not be able to sit your kids down in front of this can-powered TV and let them watch Yo Gabba Gabba for hours on end, but it’s more than enough to impress those technically minded kids.

You can check out a video of [aussie_bloke]’s can TV after the break. Thanks [gary] for sending this in.

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Hackaday Links: January 16, 2012

January 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Finally the 13-year-old on Battlefield 3 will get their comeuppance

[Shawn] sent in his fully adjustable auto-fire mod for an XBox360 controller. It’s pretty simple – just an ATtiny85 soldered to a button with a pot to adjust the rate and switch to turn it on and off. It could have been done with a 555, but this is good enough.

Now one for the PS3 bronies

[Capt-Nemo] loves and tolerates everyone so he modded his 60 Gig PS3 with a bunch of LEDs to display Rainbow Dash’s cutie mark. Yes, it’s from My Little Pony. Don’t judge us. Watch the demo video instead.

How do you organize resistors?

A while ago we saw a neat way to store resistors in a piece of foam with a grid according to the first and third color bands. [Greg] did it another way that just puts a label on a piece of foam. Can you think of a better way?

It’s not a synthesizer, but is it fake?

A lot of people have been sending in this video of [Stephen] turning his kitchen into a synthesizer. We’re thinking he turned a bunch of bowls and cans into an MPC / MIDI controller at best, or it was all done in post. We’ll let our readers duke it out in the comments.

Blinky things spinning very fast

A gracious Hack a Day reader sent in a mechanical television demo he found during late night intertube browsing. We know it’s from a 1992 episode of Computer Club that aired in Germany. It’s four rotating bars of 232 LEDs that will display a standard TV signal. We think it might be time for an RGB LED version of this. Any takers?