Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Quick and dirty raspberry pi retro console from an old tv”.
I picked up this retro television the other day, it’s just a tiny little portable thing, but I thought it would be perfect as a little game console with a Raspberry Pi on the rare occasion that I feel like playing video games. My TV is always busy. Oh, it has this really cool little handle that pops out that lets. You pick it up and carry it around. I just thought that was too neat to pass up. I’M going to use a little screen that I got from Adafruit that plugs into the Raspberry Pi and one of those controllers, I’m pretty much just gutting. This thing, there’s not a whole lot more to it check out the way this handle works.
It’S a cool, little latching system kind of mesmerizing. The screen was much bigger than the existing hole in the TV, so I needed to cut the faceplate of TV big enough so that the screen could show through this was the bulk of this project. Just cutting this base plate out to the right size here you can see I’m just using an abrasive wheel on a rotary tool to get it cut out and kind of smooth out the sides and make sure everything fits and then, after that I disassembled this screen, Because the whole case did not fit inside, there was just slightly too big, so I disassembled the screen and pull the screen out for sizing and I can get the faceplate the front of the case to fit in there and it’s held in place with hot glue. I get it all in place and then I tape it all off, because I want to cover those bright spots from cutting with spray paint. I don’t want them to show through the protective cover. A quick coat of paint gets rid of that nasty cut mark those cuts, don’t even have to be that pretty, because you really can’t see it through the tinted. Plexiglas kind of fronts displace cover, peeled off the tape and it just looks beautiful and I started mounting things inside that quick test fire shows you can see it through the front display of that smoked glass. Just fine, it’s not glass, the smoked plastic, and so then it comes time to cover up the holes. In the back for this I just use cardboard covered in fabric using just hot glue and the adhesive.
It looks pretty good actually from the outside. You’Ll see it later, and then I pulled the original speaker that was in the television and just wired it directly into the audio out from the Raspberry Pi. It’S not very loud, but it’ll do for now and the rest of the time.
All that was left to do was like cram everything in there. I didn’t really modify the power, I didn’t add much to it. I just shoved it all in the box and added a little bit of a latch on the bottom there. It is all done. I can’t say I’m really happy with how that turned out. Really the only major modification to the TV itself that I made was cutting the hole for this display.
The rest is just cramming it in a box. I got the Raspberry Pi in there the display in there a speaker which is just a passive speaker that originally came in the TV I’ll, probably replace that with a powered speaker, because it’s super quiet and then I patched up these little holes in the back. With that cardboard with fabric over it, as you saw – and I think that looks really pretty nice – the power – I got one of these nice woven extension cords and just have that in there unmodified with everything plugged into it totally works, I mean you can play and Browse stuff and it looks cool, I looks fantastic actually, although this version of the emulator I got works better with my xbox controllers and this, but that doesn’t look as cool for the video, so I may, I may have to get a new distribution, a fixed looking Big, so that it works that I with this, because this just looks so much cooler, but I can always open it up and just plug whatever I want into the USB port. It’S all still accessible, really like how it turned out. Oh, when I cut this handle functional still totally separate from the bait. I don’t know why you would ever need to use that, but you could, if you needed to, I didn’t, want to destroy it because that’s cool alright, see you next time. .