It’s an annoyance for some participants of our group, that it has change into nearly unattainable to shop for a TV that’s now not a so-called “sensible” TV. Those gadgets include a pc in addition to the show, and it boots right into a locked-down OS with a consumer interface and a load of streaming apps. Can anything else be achieved with them as opposed to what their producers supposed? [Nina Kalinina] has controlled it, taking the mainboard from a discarded LCD TV and freeing the ARM Linux board inside.
At the board are all of the inputs you’d be expecting from a TV, along side Ethernet, and a few additional USB ports hidden within the WiFi interface. There’s a UART to be had at the SCART connector, and getting access to the U-boot menu is accomplished via the bizarre manner of sending a personality to the infrared port the usage of a Palm Pilot. Unusually the instrument tree within the Flash was once editable, so with the Linux OS accessed, the board was once published as having a dual-core Novatek SoC.
That is harking back to the times when the brand new hotness was once dragging a Linux field out of a house router, and simply as the ones had been briefly eclipsed via reasonably priced forums such because the Raspberry Pi, so would possibly those TV forums meet the similar destiny. If, on the other hand, they may be able to be made to force a display screen with one thing extra helpful than the TV interface then that would possibly alternate, as who wouldn’t wish to make an outdated sensible TV a little bit extra helpful?
