Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are a fascinating display technology that has been largely abandoned outside of retro gaming and a few other niche uses. They use magnets to steer a beam of electrons rapidly across a screen, and while a marvel of engineering for their time, their expense, complexity, and weight all led to them […]
If you’ve got a decent CRT monitor, you can usually adjust the settings to make sure the image scans nicely across the whole display. But what if you could rotate the whole image itself? [Jeri Ellsworth] has shown us how to achieve this with an amusing mechanical hack. The trick behind this is simple. On […]
[Nicholas Murray]’s Composite Test Pattern Generator is a beautifully-made, palm-sized tool that uses an ESP32-based development board to output different test patterns in PAL/NTSC. If one is checking out old televisions or CRTs, firing up a test pattern can be a pretty handy way to see if the hardware is healthy or not. The little […]
Have you ever imagined what the Nintendo Switch would look like if Nintendo had produced it in the mid-1990s? [Joel Creates] evidently did, because that’s exactly what this retro CRT-toting Switch 2 dock looks like. Yes, it is portable, thanks to a 100W power bank torn apart and built into the 3D printed case. The […]
CRT monitors: there’s nothing quite like ’em. But did you know that video projectors used to use CRTs? A trio of monochrome CRTs, in fact: one for each color; red, green, and blue. By their powers combined, these monsters were capable of fantastic resolution and image quality. Despite being nowhere near as bright as modern […]
CRTs don’t last forever, and neither do the electronics that drive them. When you have a screen starting to go wonky, then you need a way to troubleshoot which is at fault. A great tool for that is a pattern generator, but they’re not the easiest to come by these days. [baritonomarchetto] needed a pattern […]
It would be hard to find any electronics still in production which use CRT displays, but for some inscrutable reason it’s easy to find cheap 4-inch CRTs on AliExpress. Not that we’re complaining, of course. Especially when they get picked up for projects like this Retro CRT Weather Display from [Conrad Farnsworth], which recreates the […]
Plenty of readers will be familiar with CRT televisions, not least because many of us use them with retrocomputers and consoles. But perhaps fewer will have worked with CRTs themselves as components, and of those, fewer still will be familiar with the earlier generation of tubes. In the first few decades of color TV the […]
Those of us who worked in TV repair shops, back when there was such a thing, will likely remember the cardinal rule of TV repair: Never touch the yoke if you can help it. The complex arrangement of copper wire coils and ferrite beads wrapped around a plastic cone attached to the neck of the […]