I'm a scrapper and hacker of vintage electronics. I found this wacky old portable TV with a small B&W screen and I really love the look of it. I want to feed it video (or something) from a Raspberry Pi. However, it does not have any kind of video input. It doesn't have RCA Composite in, or HDMI in. I'm including a couple photos of the electronics to give you an idea what I'm working with.
Ideally, I would like to input video. Alternatively, I would be happy displaying something like PONG or any kind of vector line display.
Any ideas?
Best Answer
You'll want an old-school RF modulator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_modulator. These were common in the days prior to baseband composite inputs on TVs. They basically are an upconverter-in-a-box: they take the composite signal and upconvert it to the VHF broadcast band so that it looks like an over-the-air signal to the TV. You simply tune to the channel the modulator upconverts to, and presto, you've got video.
If the TV doesn't have a coaxial input for the antenna (ie: it has integrated rabbit ears), you'll need wire one in place of the antenna. In this case, you may also need an attenuator between the modulator and the antenna input, as the RF frontend of the TV might saturate above a certain input level. I would try without an attenuator first, though.