Pico Television (working) - projector style

thingiverse

This is the 4th pico-television I made, the first one I published. A small television (monitor, really) made out of an old VHS-C camera (using the black and white CRT viewfinder and the camera lens) and a simple, one transistor amplifier (see schematic attached). It uses a common RCA audio mono and video low res input. The project uses a 16 mm CRT; if your camera uses the 15 or 18 mm CRT, you will need to modify the main body to fit it. I used the lens from the same camera; there are many lens inside, I used the two bigger ones; 25 mm and 28/30 mm; if your lens have different size you will need to modify the lens part. You can also make it working as real projector; you only need to adjust the focal length, probably building a longer lens support and inverting the vertical and horizontal deflections on the cathode ray tube. This is made simply inverting the two wires of every deflection coil (usually blue and red, and yellow and brown or white). This will flip the image horizontally and vertically. ---------------------------------------------------- PLA printed, 20% infill, 190° C, standard quality, on a Creality Ender 3 Pro ---------------------------------------------------- You will need some basic Knowledge about electronic, etc. I suggest to use a B/W viewfinder, the color ones are quite hard to use. Usually the black and white viewfinders use a small 16 mm cathode ray tube and a simple electronic board. There are five wires coming from the camera to the viewfinder, usually you only need three of them: +5v, video input and GND. In some rare cases you will get a negative image; in this case you will probably need to connect another wire to +5V or GND. BEWARE: DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK! HIGH VOLTAGE ON THE CRT BOARD!!! ---------------------------------------------------- Troubleshooting The viewfinder boards work with +5V; I suggest to use a PC USB plug to power it; phone chargers sometimes don't supply a stabilized enough voltage for that purpose. if you get some problem on your image (waves, bad image, etc.) unplug it immediately and replace all the electrolytic capacitors on the CRT board. I had to do that on many of my boards, due to their age.