Sunday, January 31

ESP8266 Transmits Television on Channel 3

We’ve seen a lot of ESP8266 projects in the past, but this one most definitely qualifies as a hack. [Cnlohr] noticed that the ESP8266, when overclocked, could operate the IIC port at around 80MHz and still not lose DMA data. He worked out how to create bit patterns that generate RF around 60MHz. Why is that interesting? Analog TVs can receive signals around that frequency on channel 3.

As you can see in the video below, the output is monochrome only and is a little snowy. It also will lose frames on some WiFi events, but this is all forgivable when you consider this very inexpensive module isn’t meant to do video output at all.

You’ll see in the video that the overclocked ESP8266 is quite capable. It draws text, 2D shapes, and even multiple 3D shapes. Oh, it also is serving out a web page at the same time. If you want to try it yourself, just solder a wire to the RX pin on the device and load up the code from GitHub.

This isn’t the first time (or even the second time) we’ve seen [Cnlohr]. His YouTube channel has everything from using WebSockets on the ESP8266 to a minuscule Minecraft server. Definitely worth a look.

Thanks to [Rodrigo Pereira], [Tobias], and [Lucas] for the tip!


Filed under: video hacks, wireless hacks

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