I started this project after noting how my enthusiasm and interest in television had changed over time. With a million streaming options, why was I bored with it all? Something feels heartless about it all and it made me wonder if the experience of TV had been better when I was a kid in the late 1970's and 80s. I decided to try and recreate the experience I had with TV back in the day. While my personal experiment focuses on my own experience in the late 70's and early 80s, the hardware/software described in this project can easily extend to any era of OTA broadcast television.
Success Metrics: A convincing recreation of OTA TV in the USA in the late 70's and early 80's:
- When the TV is turned on, a believable show for the time slot and network should be playing
- When switching between channels, the shows should continue playing serially as though they had been broadcasting the whole time
Software
For my experiment, I wanted to simulate the 3 major networks, PBS and some local channels. To recreate that, I would need custom software that supports multiple channels to:
- Manage video content stored on disk
- Programming schedules that rotates weekly
- Cut commercials and bumps to build-out schedules to start/end on hour and half-hour boundaries
- Replay the schedule true-to-time
- Change the channel on user's signal
The software and related documentation are available from the github repo linked to this project.
Hardware
For my experiment, I wanted the system to be completely standalone, so I used a Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pico. It will run fine on any Linux system with video acceleration.
The following diagram shows the layout. The neopixel strip and momentary switch live in the channel changer device, while the rest is house in a cigar box. The tactile button on the left is used to signal a shutdown of the display software (fallback to desktop) while the one on the right is to signal a full shutdown. These commands are sent from the pico to the pi via UART serial lines.
Very cool, just wrote this up for the blog. Great work, thanks for the nostalgia overload!