How To Roll Your Own Custom Object Detection Neural Network

Real-time object detection, which uses neural networks and deep learning to rapidly identify and tag objects of interest in a video feed, is a handy feature with great hacker potential. Happily, it…

RCA’s Clear Plastic TV Wowed Crowds In 1939

In the United States in 1939, television sets still had a long way to go before they pretty much sold themselves. Efforts to do just that are what led to RCA’s Lucite Phantom Telereceiver, wh…

Arduino Does SDI Video With FPGA Help

If you are running video around your home theater, you probably use HDMI. If you are running it in a professional studio, however, you are probably using SDI, Serial Digital Interface. [Chris Brown…

Generating PAL Video With A Heavily Overclocked Pi Pico

Barely a week goes by without another hack blessing the RP2040 with a further interfacing superpower. This time it’s the turn of the humble PAL standard composite video interface. As many of …

35mm Film Restoration Process Explained

For a large part of the 20th century, motion pictures were distributed on nitrate film. Although cheaper for the studios, this film was highly flammable and prone to decay. On top of that, most fil…

What’s Inside A Super-Cheap Projector? Not A Lot!

[Raymond Ma] has a penchant for browsing Aliexpress and purchasing curious pieces of hardware that are as high on promises as they are low on cost. This is a process he aptly sums up with his openi…

Printed Film Camera Gets 10 Seconds Out Of A 35mm Roll

When the British budget electronics brand Amstrad released their first budget VHS camcorder in the mid 1980s, they advertised it as making a filmmaker out of everyone. Now everyone truly is a filmm…

The Story Behind The TVGuardian Curse Catcher

The recent flurry of videos and posts about the TVGuardian foul language filter brought back some fond memories. I was the chief engineer on this project for most of its lifespan. You’ve watc…

CGA Competitors From The 1980s

[David Murray], aka The 8-Bit Guy, did an interesting video (embedded below the break) on the time line of PC graphics cards from CGA through to EGA. Not only does he explain the different offering…

NERF – Neural Radiance Fields

Making narrative film just keeps getting easier. What once took a studio is now within reach of the dedicated hobbyist. And Neural Radiance Fields are making it a dramatic step easier. The guys fro…

At A Loss For Words? Try A Teleprompter

With everyone doing videos these days, you might want to up your narration game with a teleprompter. [Modern Hobbyist] can help. Since he does videos — like the one about the teleprompter bel…

DIY Streamdeck Helps You Professionalize Your Twitch Show

The one thing that separates the pros on Twitch from the dilettantes is the production values. It’s all about the smooth transitions, and you’ll never catch the big names fiddling with …

Slingbox Getting Bricked – You Have Less Than 24 Hours

The Slingbox devices used to let you catch up with the programming on your TV when you weren’t near it, using your Internet-connected mobile device. As cable TV became less popular, their bus…

Make Your Pi Moonlight As A Security Camera

A decade ago, I was learning Linux through building projects for my own needs. One of the projects was a DIY CCTV system based on a Linux box – specifically, a user-friendly all-in-one packag…

An Oscilloscope Trigger For Vintage Video Processors

Working on retro computers is rarely straightforward, as [ukmaker] recently found out while designing a new display interface. Their oscilloscope was having trouble triggering on the video signal p…

An Open-Source HDMI Capture Card

[YuzukiHD] has provided files for anyone that wishes to build their own HDMI capture card at home. The design is known as the Yuzuki Loop Out HDMI Capture Card PRO, or YuzukiLOHCC PRO for short. Th…

Compensating For Your TVs Backlight

[Pekka Väänänen] has a Panasonic TV with a broken backlight that creates an uneven pink/green color. While it isn’t a huge deal for most films, black-and-white films tend to show the most eff…

TRS-80 Gains Multiple Monitor Support, And High-Resolution Graphics

To call [Glen Kleinschmidt] a vintage computing enthusiast would be an understatement. Who else would add the ability to control and address multiple VGA monitors to a rack-mounted TRS-80 Model 1? …

Truthsayer Uses Facial Recognition To See If You’re Telling The Truth

It’s hard to watch [Mark Zuckerberg]’s 2018 Congressional testimony and not come to the conclusion that he is, at a minimum, quite a bit different than the average person. Of course, ha…

This Simple Media Player Will Inspire Beginners And Invite Experimentation

While it would have been considered science-fiction just a few decades ago, the ability to watch virtually any movie or TV show on a little slab that fits in your pocket is today no big deal. But f…