When [Dr. Moddnstine] saw a 1978 General Electric TV in the trash, he just had to save it. As it turned out, it still worked! An idea hatched — what if he could turn it into a vintage Chromecast TV?
He opened up the TV and started poking around inside. We should note that old TV’s are pretty dangerous to open up if you’re not familiar with the components inside — high-voltages that could kill you linger on some capacitors. [Dr. Moddnstine] didn’t go into too much detail, so do a little extra research before you open up a TV.
Part of his goal for this project was to keep everything self-contained within the TV so all you would have to do is plug it into the wall in order to use it. Since the TV is so old, it doesn’t even have an analog RCA connections for a video input — just a VHF input. Because of this he needed to use three separate connection adapters to get the video signal to the TV.
First step was an adapter for HDMI to composite video, then composite video to an RF modulator, and then the coaxial output from the RF modulator to a two-lead VHF plug adapter. Phew. We’re surprised he found enough space inside of the case to fit it all in!
We’ve shared a lot of retro TV builds over the years, but this is the first one we’ve seen that utilizes a Chromecast. Most use Raspberry Pi’s, and some versions that just replace the old tube with a brand spanking new LCD!
[via r/DIY]
Filed under: video hacks
No comments:
Post a Comment