Category Archives: analog tv

Send a Raspberry Pi Back in Time to 1980

Posted on by

One of our favorite hacker-scavengers on YouTube, [The Post-Apocalyptic Inventor], has been connecting his Raspberry Pi up to nearly every display that he’s got in his well-stocked junk pile. (Video embedded below.)

Modern monitors with an HDMI input connect right up to the Pi. Before HDMI came VGA, but the Pi doesn’t do that natively. One solution is to use a composite-to-VGA converter and pull the composite signal out of the audio jack. Lacking the right 4-pole audio cable, [TPAI] soldered some RCA plugs directly onto the Pi, and plugged that into the converter. On a yet-older monitor, he faced …read more

Continue reading Send a Raspberry Pi Back in Time to 1980→

Never Twice the Same Color: Why NTSC is so Weird

Posted on by

Ever wonder why analog TV in North America is so weird from a technical standpoint? [standupmaths] did, so he did a little poking into the history of the universally hated NTSC standard for color television and the result is not only an explanation for how American TV standards came to be, but also a lesson in how engineers sometimes have to make inelegant design compromises.

Before we get into a huge NTSC versus PAL fracas in the comments, as a resident of the US we’ll stipulate that our analog color television standards were lousy. But as [standupmaths] explores in some …read more

Continue reading Never Twice the Same Color: Why NTSC is so Weird→