If you’ve laid hands on a retro analog TV, have the restoration bug, and you plan to make the final project at least somewhat period-correct, you face a bit of a conundrum: what are you going to watch? Sure, you can serve up just about any content digitally these days, but some programs just don’t feel right on an old TV. And even if you do get suitably retro programming, streaming isn’t quite the same as the experience of tuning your way through the somewhat meager selections as we did back in the analog days.
But don’t worry — this Raspberry Pi TV simulator can make your streaming experience just like the analog TV experience of yore. It comes to us from [Rodrigo], who found a slightly abused 5″ black-and-white portable TV that was just right for the modification. The battery compartment underneath the set made 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 the Pi which “channel” you’re currently tuned to.
Composite video is fed from the Pi’s output right into the TV’s video input, and the image quality is just about what you’d expect. But for our money, the thing that really sells this is the use of a relay to switch the TV’s tuner back into the circuit for a short bit between channel changes. This gives a realistic burst of static and snow, just like we endured in the old days. Hats off to [Rodrigo] for capturing everything that was awful about TV back in the day — Mesa of Lost Women, indeed! — but still managing to make it look good.
Game day is right around the corner, which means it’s one of the best times of the year to upgrade your TV. Aside from the holiday shopping season, the few weeks leading up to the Super Bowl have some of the best TV deals you’ll find throughout the year. Sets from Samsung, LG, Hisense and others can be hundreds of dollars off and you can even find devices like soundbars and streamers for less, too.
Just keep in mind that often the best discounts will be on more expensive TVs. That’s great if you’re looking for a high-end or very large television for your living room, but not ideal if you’re on a strict budget. But retailers like Amazon and Best Buy still have a bunch of TVs under $500 that are worth considering if you don’t want to spend too much — and it's possible to save money on those, too.
If you’re going to upgrade this year and plan to order online, we recommend doing so soon so you can have the new tube delivered and set up before game day arrives. Here are the best Super Bowl TV deals we could find, plus a few other home entertainment sales that are worth considering.
50-inch Samsung Class 7 4K smart TV
This highly-rated 50-inch Samsung 4K TV is $80 off and down to $400. This Tizen set has a crystal display plus support for HDR, Motion Rate 120 and Game Enhancer.
Hisense's 55-inch Quantum Dot 4K TV is 30 percent off and down to just under $600. It packs a lot of value into a relatively affordable TV — the set supports a 120Hz native refresh rate, Dolby Vision and Atmos, 1,000 nits of peak brightness and Game Mode Pro, the latter of which makes use of HDMI 2.1, low latency mode, variable refresh rates and more.
Samsung's 2021 55-inch Neo QLED smart TV is $300 off and down to $1,300. It uses Quantum Mini LED technology to improve details in both dark and bright scenes, and it supports things like 4K AI upscaling, Quantum HDR, 120Hz refresh rates, FreeSync Premium Pro and more.
Samsung's 65-inch Frame set is down to a record low fo $1,500, which is $500 off its normal price. In addition to 4K support and Quantum Dot technology, the Frame TVs have Art Mode, which lets you show pieces of art on the screen when you're not using it.
LG's 65-inch C1 OLED set is on sale for $1,800, or $300 off its normal price. In addition to excellent contrast, intense colors and webOS 6.0, it supports HDMI 2.1, NVIDIA G-Sync and FreeSync Premium for a better gaming experience along with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice commands.
This 75-inch Hisense set is down to $2,000, or $1,000 off its normal price. It uses a luminance control panel behind the 4K screen to manage color more accurately, plus it has high contrast and up to 1,000 nits of peak brightness. The set also supports HDR, Dolby Vision, 120Hz refresh rates, low latency mode, VRR and more.
This large Sony OLED smart TV has been discounted by $600, bringing it down to $2,900. It uses Sony's Cognitive Processor XR for strong performance and Acoustic Surface Audio+ for immersive sound, plus it supports 4K AI upscaling, XR Motion Clarity, HDMI 2.1 and more.
The latest Apple TV 4K is on sale for $160, or $20 off its normal price. While the 2021 version isn't drastically different from the previous model, its new Siri remote is a big selling point. We gave it a score of 90 for its speedy performance, HomeKit integration and the easy of use that comes with the improved Siri remote.
The Streambar Pro is $30 off and down to an all-time low of $150. It has all of the features that the standard Streambar does along with four 2.5-inch full range drivers, private listening and a lost remote finder in the Roku mobile app.
Amazon's Fire TV Stick 4K has been discounted to $30, which is 40 percent off its normal price. This gives you 4K streaming with Dolby Vision in an ultra-compact package, and the stick also supports Dolby Atmos audio and Alexa voice commands.
The Fire TV Cube is down to $85, or only $10 more than its record-low price. Despite being a few years old, it's still a strong set-top box and the most powerful in Amazon's lineup. It supports 4K HDR streaming, Dolby Vision and Atmos, HDR10+ and Alexa controls for both your TV and compatible smart home gadgets.
Optoma's CinemaX P2 projector is $800 off, bringing it down to $2,499. This earned a spot in our best projectors guide thanks to its 3,000 lumen brightness, improved color accuracy and 80 percent DCI-P3 coverage.
Gesture recognition and machine learning are getting a lot of air time these days, as people understand them more and begin to develop methods to implement them on many different platforms. Of course this allows easier access to people who can make use of the new tools beyond strictly academic or business environments. For example, rollerblading down the streets of Atlanta with a gesture-recognizing, streaming TV that [nate.damen] wears over his head.
He’s known as [atltvhead] and the TV he wears has a functional LED screen on the front. The whole setup reminds us a little of Deep Thought. The screen can display various animations which are controlled through Twitch chat as he streams his journeys around town. He wanted to add a little more interaction to the animations though and simplify his user interface, so he set up a gesture-sensing sleeve which can augment the animations based on how he’s moving his arm. He uses an Arduino in the arm sensor as well as a Raspberry Pi in the backpack to tie it all together, and he goes deep in the weeds explaining how to use Tensorflow to recognize the gestures. The video linked below shows a lot of his training runs for the machine learning system he used as well.
[nate.damen] didn’t stop at the cheerful TV head either. He also wears a backpack that displays uplifting messages to people as he passes them by on his rollerblades, not wanting to leave out those who don’t get to see him coming. We think this is a great uplifting project, and the amount of work that went into getting the gesture recognition machine learning algorithm right is impressive on its own. If you’re new to Tensorflow, though, we have featured some projects that can do reliable object recognition using little more than a Raspberry Pi and a camera.
Last night Massimo Banzi was Guest Judge on Intel America’s Greatest Maker - episode 4 and had the difficult task of evaluating the teams and their projects competing in the Make or Break rounds for $100,000 and a spot in the million dollar finale.
An Arduino Uno appeared at The Tonight Show thanks to a project called Wildfire Warning System created by a 14 years old girl from California. Take a look at the video to discover how you can detect fires using a gas sensor and a temperature sensor.
And guess what? Jimmy Fallon knows what an Arduino is! Watch the video:
Heidi Røneid with an Arduino Ethernet microprocessor. (Photo: Tore Zakariassen, NRK)
When The Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) planned the television broadcast of the Chess Olympiad 2014 in Tromsø, Norway, they encountered a challenge: how to mix video, graphics and the results of many ongoing chess games simultaneously, requiring 16 cameras for the games going on at the same time?
At first, the idea was to use a computer with a webcam for each of the 16 games, then mix video images, background animation and results in software on each of them.
Afterwards the finished mix of images would be streamed to separate channels in our web player, so that the online audience would be able to choose which game they wanted to follow. This solution would also provide our outside broadcasting van (OB van) with 16 finished video sources composed of video, graphics and results. This would make the complex job of mixing all video signals much easier.
After thorough thinking we came to the conclusion that for our web-audience, it would be better to skip the stream of individual games, and spend our resources on building websites that could present all games in the championship via HTML in real time. This would also give the audience the opportunity to scroll back and forth in the moves and recall all the previous games in the championship. We started working on it immediately, and you can find the result on our website nrk.no/sjakk.
This is a good example of hacking devices with Arduino. [sspence65] has put on oa good tutorial to start from something easy and simple: IR hack.
Capturing codes from any tv remote, and using them to control devices attached to Arduino Outputs. Press a button on a TV Remote, and the code appears in the serial monitor, Add that code to the case/switch statements in the sketch to control an output pin.
On the [website] there is the full explanation and code to build the same experience, but nothing prevent you to implement a custom way for your IR devices.
As seen in the picture there is an Arduino Uno with a protoshield on top with an IR receiver and IR LED. I undertook this project to learn how we used infra red light to control everyday devices and why it was used so often. I found that the process behind it is actually quite simple and I now have a better understanding of what is happening in the invisible infra red world.
The basis of the code was taken from adafruit as this is where I mainly learnt how it all worked.
