As any generation of people get older, they tend to look back fondly on their formative years when there was less responsibility and more wonder. Even if things have objectively improved, we often have a fondness for the past. Such is the case for cable television, where even though ads were everywhere and nothing was on-demand, we can see that something was lost from this era in the modern streaming ecosystem. [Ricardo] brought back the good parts of this golden era of cable TV with this small channel surfing television.
The project attempts to keep the good parts of this era while discarding things we certainly don’t miss. The ability to channel surf is still here, with a rotary encoder standing in for an antique television channel selector knob, but dealing with any telecommunications company is out, including those of the Internet variety. Instead it is a fully offline machine with the user able to curate their own channels and programming with a Flask application, and [Ricardo]’s includes his own collection of commercials from Argentina.
The hardware itself is fairly straightforward as well, with a Raspberry Pi doing the heavy lifting, paired with a small screen and enclosed in a retro-themed television case. It’s a clever throwback to a time where we might not know what we wanted to see but there was always something on. Builds like this are gaining popularity right now as well, and we’ve even seen them recreate the cable company’s preview channel as well.
I help take care of my 89 year old father. Getting to our local NFL affiliate takes firing up the TV with the Roku remote, navigating to HULU, selecting ‘live’ and hopefully that’s the last channel he picked. If not, he can’t get it. Sometimes he blanks on the fact it’s HULU and winds up in some other worthless app on the Roku. (I remove the ones I can). When we try something else, to simplify it, he gets confused by that, too. He’ll press the wrong button and wind up god knows where in some menu. Often, he just hands someone the remote to put it on the channel he needs. A simple rotary clicker to cycle through the TV he likes to watch would be an f-ing godsend.
Wide screen tube TV? What alternate universe is this from? I have one of those digital typewriters with an extra wide tube in it fit for cinema-wide or more, so it could have been at least in B/W.
“discarding things we certainly don’t miss” heh
In order to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was often necessary to send someone off of the couch to run into the yard and orient the big aerial to point towards the nearest big city, if it had drifted from wind or so on. To watch Babylon 5, we had to re-orient the antenna again, and still reception was sketchy…and to top it off, it was at an awful time. There was some channel that played old Trek re-runs at like 4 in the morning.
Good riddance to that nightmare but i can’t say i don’t miss it :)
I remember that with analog TV, there was the expensive solution, have a number of aerials pointing in different directions, and then selectively amplify the useful channels. Being all analogue, putting all correctly was a complex task and not all technicians were capable to do a good work, there was also the stratification of the antenna that was important to minimize interference. With digital TV the problem is now a lot simpler and anyway most networks are now in SFM mode, so one has to find the better signal, but the channel is the same, and because TV amplifier are now CPU controller they can decide automatically the better signal and sett the correct amplitude value.
The other solution was an antenna rotor. You just turn the knob to the direction you want and it rotates the antenna. The downside was that it took about a minute to make a full turn.
They don’t work with digital TV since you have to scan for channels and the tuners won’t allow you to combine multiple scans.