If you have your hands on a retro analog TV, have a recovery bug, and you plan to make the final project at least some time-correct, you’ll run into some problems: What are you going to see? Of course, you can now digitally serve any content, but some programs don’t look right on older TVs. And even if you get the right retro programming, streaming isn’t as much of an experience tuning your way through the trivial selection as we did in the analog days.
But don’t worry – this Raspberry Pi TV simulator can make your streaming experience look like your previous analog TV experience. It comes to us from [Rodrigo], Who found a slightly abused 5 ″ black-and-white portable TV that was just right for a change. The battery compartment at the bottom of the set makes the perfect place to mount a Pi, which takes care of streaming a variety of old movies and shorts. The position of the original tuning potentiometer is read by an Arduino, which tells Pi which channel you are currently tuning to.
Composite video is delivered directly from the output of the pie to the video input of the TV, and the image quality is exactly as you expected. But for our money, the thing that really sells it is the use of relays to bring the TV tuner back into the circuit for a short time between channel changes. It freezes and gives a realistic burst of snow, just like we endured in the old days. Hats off to [Rodrigo] To capture everything that was terrible about the TV of the previous day – Messa of the lost woman, Indeed! – But still managing to make it look beautiful.