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Retrofit a handheld Casio portable TV with a Raspberry Pi

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What do we say to the god of outdated tech? Not today! Revive an old portable television with a Raspberry Pi 3!

Pocket televisions

In the late 1980s, when I was a gadget-savvy kid, my mother bought me a pocket TV as a joint Christmas and birthday present. The TV’s image clarity was questionable, its sound tinny, and its aerial so long that I often poked myself and others in the eye while trying to find a signal. Despite all this, it was one of the coolest, most futuristic things I’d ever seen, and I treasured it. But, as most tech of its day, the pocket TV no longer needed: I can watch TV in high definition on my phone — a device half the size, with a screen thrice as large, and no insatiable hunger for AA batteries.

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So what do we do with this old tech to save it from the tip?

We put a Raspberry Pi in it, of course!

JaguarWong’s Raspberry Pi 3 pocket TV!

“I picked up a broken Casio TV-400 for the princely sum of ‘free’ a few weeks back. And I knew immediately what I wanted to do with it,” imgur user JaguarWong states in the introduction for the project.

I got the Pi for Christmas a couple of years back and have never really had any plans for it. Not long after I got it, I picked up the little screen from eBay to play with but again, with no real purpose in mind — but when I got the pocket TV everything fell into place.

Isn’t it wonderful when things fall so perfectly into place?

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Thanks to an online pinout guide, JW was able to determine how to  connect the screen and the Raspberry Pi; fortunately, only a few jumper wires were needed — “which was handy given the limits on space.”

With slots cut into the base of the TV for the USB and Ethernet ports, the whole project fit together like a dream, with little need for modification of the original housing.

The final result is wonderful. And while JW describes the project as “fun, if mostly pointless”, we think it’s great — another brilliant example of retrofitting old tech with Raspberry Pi!

10/10 would recommend to a friend.

Website: LINK

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Written by Maria Richter

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