Retro CCTV monitor

-

This is the second of these little black and white televisions I've picked up. I think my wife got this one in a charity shop in Portaferry (for £3 if I remember right). They run on 12 volts or a load of batteries and have a radio as well as TV.



Anyway, a bit of Internet research revealed that all of the RF side of TV things is handled by a single chip and the composite video is dealt with by old-school transistors. This made it easy enough to cut into the video circuit at the right point and hook it up to the DVD player and we have a retro composite monitor.


The radio section was on its own board which I removed along with the speaker, front panel switches and so on. Some plastic card to fill the gaps, epoxy and satin black paint gave it a bit of 80s class! I also added a power LED to the front and re-wired the antenna jack socket to act as the video input.

The DVD player is actually a recorder I got on Freegle because the power supply had packed in. In this case the transformer had fried, maybe due to a shorted 'bad cap', so I replaced the whole power board with a similar one from another broken DVD player. A bit of drilling and soldering and it is working like new. It would make a great CCTV security recorder.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Electronics Upcycling

-
Image
ELECTRONICS UPCYCLING FAQ CHECK OUT THE OTHER POSTS ON THIS BLOG FOR DETAILS ON REPAIRS AND UPGRADES GOING BACK OVER 10 YEARS - What's the story? I've been tinkering with circuits for over 40 years and have an MSc in microelectronics, and a few years ago realised I could combine this with saving the planet. Basically I'm Greta Thunberg with a soldering iron. - Saving the planet? Well every electronic item kept out of landfill reduces the amounts of dangerous 'forever chemicals', getting released into the environment. By repairing items or stripping out most of the reusable parts this reduces what ends up in landfill and ensures the components go into the correct recycling bins, such as hard plastic cases. - Don't the council do that? Up to a point, but information has emerged about huge amounts of European electronic waste being shipped to Africa and Asia where it continues to damage the environment and people's health, especially the women paid
Read more

Powered USB Hub - £2

-
Image
 I bought a couple of these little USB 2.0 hubs for £1 each in PoundWorld intending to adapt them to be powered hubs for use with RaspberryPi computers.  Alan here ( http://pihub.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/raspberry-pi-power-supply-and-powered.html ) beat me to it, but I wanted to give it a go with a flying power socket.  As usual, heat-shrink sleeve comes in to save the day. I didn't like the original USB lead and plug so I bought a USB-to-Micro USB cable (again for £1) and cut it in half.  One end goes to power the RPi and the other is the input USB. The input USB has only 3 connections made, the red power wire is cut short and ignored.  I did connect the ground (GND) wire though because the purist in me doesn't like the idea of floating grounds (blame my MSc).   The output for power to the RPi via the micro USB plug only has the GND and +5v connections made and the other 2 signal lines were chopped short and ignored. The power input was made from a DC power socket sal
Read more

Update on the touch monitor

-
This is tantalising... I found some data on driver chips used on these low-cost monitors and some of them have an I2C connection for sending pixel data directly to the screen. This may be to allow text or graphics overlay. Anyway the chip on my 7" screens is an AR05C-LF and there are millions of these in stock in the far east, but I can't so far find a data sheet for this chip or its sibling the AR05CA-LF. Being able to send digital pixel data via I2C directly to the screen would be, well, brilliant.
Read more