I realized I don't have a monitor which will take composite input!   The only TVs we have in the house which take it are much too big for my workstation - so on to Goodwill!!!   That's what I did last night and here is a quick recap of my adventure - feel free to skip this entry entirely it has no technical details relevant to my project.

So I went to Goodwill last night to get myself a monitor with composite input.  They had a whole rack of old monitors Dell, Gateway, Acer, you name it!  

Guess what I found out about old monitors?  Most of them only have a VGA input!  I figured they would all include composite... I'm not sure why, I guess because my old one did.  Anyway so I found 1 that had composite input - I was super excited!  Then I realized it had a custom power plug instead of the standard 3 hole one... ugh of course it did.

So I went on a search through every power supply I could find in Goodwill, nothing provided the 3.5 amps needed by this thing :(

I decided to switch gears and try to find an old small TV, oddly enough they have very few.  After much searching I found an old LCD panel that you'd strap to the back of a car seat so your kids can watch a movie.  It used a miniplug input for A/V composite.. but no big deal I have one at home.  It took awhile to find a matching power supply but I found one and tested it out - the screen lit up so I was good go!

My quick 5 minute 8:00pm Goodwill trip ended up taking almost an hour as my patient wife roamed the asiles with our tired 6 year old...but...totally worth it!

So after getting home I figured I should test this sucker first...I found my miniplug A/V cord only to realize it wasn't an A/V cord it was just audio... it only had 3 rings on the miniplug not 4 :(

By now it's like 10pm, so naturally I decided to tear through the house trying to find any miniplug with 4 rings, when I was just about to give up I finally found one - old earbuds with a mic on the cord... I figured I could strip it, wire the video signal to whichever of the 4 rings was the video one and it would work.

After some quick Internet searching I found out that there is no standard (of course there is not) but generally the video is on ring 2.  I stripped the wire and... omg the wires were so tiny and full of this fabric stuff and so twisted together that everytime I tried to separate them and wire my composite wire to it it ended up in this jumbled disaster.  I know that sounds strange, I should have taken a picture, but I've never seen wiring like that (it must be a technique they use to keep the overall cord size super small).

The only course of action was to rip it apart and extract the mini plug itself and resolder my composite wire directly to the internal connection that is linked to ring 2.  It came apart fairly easily and my trusty mulitimeter quickly showed me which internal connection to solder to.  I'm a pretty poor solderer but after some trial and error I did a decent job.

So I went to test!  It was a very exciting moment for me to have made my own adapter.  I plugged the RCA composite end into our old dvd player and the miniplug into this custom lcd panel and boom!  Buzzing and no video :(

It turns out that this thing didn't use the common choice of ring 2 for video, it used it for audio.  So... after a bit more testing and trial and error I determined it used ring 4 for video.. no problem I'll send it to ring 4.  After some rewire I was ready to test!  Now no buzzing... but the video just did a quick white flash and nothing.  I played around with it for a bit longer and came to the conclusion that either A: it doesn't take a composite input, it does say "slave device" perhaps some other master unit is sending it a custom signal.  or B: it's just broken, afterall it was thrown on a rack in Goodwill.

It was now 4 1/2 hours later, 12:30am - and I was back to square one.  SIGH!

So for my next step I'm going to use a composite to USB device and video capture software on my PC - at least until I come across a tiny tv or monitor to use.