Brazil-like monitor
Overview
In the movie Brazil you can see small, mostly black/white, stripped down, CRT monitors. I’ve also seen a store having CRTs in transparent cases. Somehow I think this is a cool retro look, so I built my own. Primarily to display weather forcast by my door.
Remember CRTs uses thousands of volts, so one should keep fingers away.
Background
A few photos from Brazil:
- http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/screenshots/brazil_15.png
- http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/b/r/a/brazil-1984-08-g.jpg
- http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yilGPzuL21U/TdbjnN7r4lI/AAAAAAAAAps/d0FZhbEDFk4/s1600/brazil13.jpg
The store cases mentioned in overview, spotted in Denmark in 2004:
Build process
I got a brand new crt off ebay. Unfortunately shipping from the US cost me more that the TV. I stripped it down, removed stuff I didn’t need (audio, tuner). The foot is from dx.com. The computer is a Raspberry Pi. Plastic flowers cover some of the wires and increases the WAF.
Brand new.
Away with the cover.
Code
Weather is from finger oslo@graph.no. It alternates between showing hour by hour for a 24 hour period, and a large weather-right-now with unicode images of sun, snow, etc. There are a few more scripts to test network and such.
Right now looks like this (your browser will have to have unicode support):
-3℃ ☃⚐
⌚11:50
Future plan
Cables from CRT to main board are very short. Will replace them with some colored fabric cables. This will also allow the arm to hang below shelf, as originally planned.