A Single Board Computer From A TV

It is an annoyance for some users of our neighborhood, that it has come to be virtually extremely hard to purchase a Tv that is not a so-known as “smart” Tv set. These models have a laptop as perfectly as the display, and it boots into a locked-down OS with a person interface and a load of streaming applications. Can something be accomplished with them other than what their makers supposed? [Nina Kalinina] has managed it, having the mainboard from a discarded Lcd Television set and liberating the ARM Linux board inside.

On the board are all the inputs you’d hope from a Tv set, alongside with Ethernet, and a pair of excess USB ports concealed in the WiFi interface. There is a UART obtainable on the SCART connector, and accessing the U-boot menu is reached by the unusual suggests of sending a character to the infrared port employing a Palm Pilot. Incredibly the machine tree in the Flash was editable, so with the Linux OS accessed, the board was uncovered as owning a dual-core Novatek SoC.

This is reminiscent of the times when the new hotness was dragging a Linux box out of a house router, and just as people have been immediately eclipsed by inexpensive boards this sort of as the Raspberry Pi, so may possibly these Tv boards satisfy the exact destiny. If, even so, they can be created to drive a screen with some thing more beneficial than the Television interface then that could possibly alter, as who wouldn’t want to make an old smart Tv set a bit much more beneficial?