Arduino and Television display

The best ideas come to me at 3AM when I'm trying to fall asleep.

In EDD our project involved using an ESP8266 WiFi module to communicate with a server. I realized how amazing this $3 module was that I bought a few for myself to play with. I was trying to think of cool projects to build with it when I found this:

http://fablab.ruc.dk/get-xmpp-protocol-on-arduino/

This person basically used the ESP8266 to act like a chatbot and display a message.

Recently in our school we sort of adopted the S A D B O Y vaporwave culture ironically. We bought bucket-hats and started spelling English words out in Japanese.

I observed that a key component of vaporwave culture is outdated technology and a hopeless nostalgia to return to the 80s-90s era.

At 3 that night I had an idea to turn a TV into a text display.

Imagine you're in a basement

and theres an old TV sitting there. No cable box, no antenna. Just plugged into the wall.

Suddenly out of nowhere a message appears on the screen. White text on black. It's speaking to YOU.

I think I'm gonna install a camera somewhere and observe the victim, while I type in something creepy and strangely specific based on visual input from the camera like "I like your red shirt".

The television will be receiving input from an Arduino connected to a chat box through the ESP8266.

I think it'll be a lot of fun to build.

I haven't completed it yet, but so far I am able to type text to the serial port and have it displayed on the TV.

I will walk you through the process of the build so far.

Take apart the TV. It should be unplugged of course. Use a screwdriver to short some capacitors if you're paranoid. CRT monitors use a flyback transformer which can do some serious damage to you.

I would recommend vacuuming out spider webs and dust before continuing. It would make the build a lot cleaner, and safer.

You should where the audio and RCA plugs are located on the TV. This is a pic of the circuitboard.

Solder 3 wires: GND, Audio, Video

This is just a fun artsy pic of the electronics inside of a television.

You can get a USB wall charger at Five Below for... $5.

You will need this so that you can power your Arduino inside of your TV without another cord. The idea is so that there is only one cord from the TV: power. The Arduino and all the circuitry will be inside the TV once it's done. The idea is stealth so that the TV looks like it has a soul of its own.

Cut the plug off.

Strip the wire. Cheap chargers like this only have + and - wires

Find where the wall plug power goes into on the TV.

Get two >=18 gauge wires

Solder them onto where the wall power comes it

Solder the other end to the phone charger. The charger is now in parallel to the TV whenever the TV turns on.

You will really want to wrap this well in electrical tape: maybe you even want to seal this off with glue.

When the TV is plugged in, you should get ~5v from the charger.

According to the TVout library, you will need two resistors for the circuit

Make sure you install the TVout library for Arduino.

Wire up the circuit

Upload the TVout example and turn on the TV.

It works!

I wrote my own code which I will publish later that writes to the TV whatever is inputted on the serial monitor. We needed to set a baudrate of 1200 because the TV is very slow.

The future goal is to implement this tiny $3 WiFi module.

lol

I hope you enjoyed!

Printing on Lighters

In a previous post I showed how to engrave a metal lighter:
http://tsjwang.blogspot.com/2015/09/bang-bang-zippo-engraving.html

If you tried this method on a disposable lighter, the lighter would probably burst. You'd be making the walls thinner on a plastic container that's already under a bunch of pressure.

So what if you want to customize your a lighter?

Ayy

This is the first one lighter I personalized. (those splotches are totally intentional)

The second lighter I tried (the fading was not intentional)

Inspired by this Vic Mensa:

 

The story behind "SAVEMONEY": https://www.redbullsoundselect.com/artists/SaveMoney

The method I used was similar to the way t-shirts are silkscreen printed. Just a stencil and some paint.
This particular lighter I'm printing for a friend :D

Get a lighter. 

The Dollar Tree sells lighters at a really nice price. Bic Lighters usually cost $1 - 2.

At the Dollar Tree, a pack of three lighters costs $1. The also come with adjustable flame in case you needed to use your lighter as a flamethrower for self defense.

A pack of two Scripto lighters (better quality) also costs $1.

Things generally cost $1 at the Dollar Tree.

Get a design down. Featured above, common slang used in San Francisco.

Print

Break out the scissors and gluesticks!

Glue the cut out onto the lighter. Make sure it's firmly impressed onto the lighter on the position you want.

Use an X-Acto knife to cut out horizontal lines first. Cut from left to right.

After that, cut from top to bottom.

All the letters removed. 

Apply your sister's nailpolish.

After it dries for 30 minutes, rinse the paper portion of the lighter under water. I don't think you want to submerge the whole lighter if you want it to work in the future.

When the paper is wet, it's a lot easier to peel off. The gluestick glue also dissolves in water, which is a big help.

 After all the paper is peeled off, scratch off any blemishes and apply a coat of transparent lacquer (clear nailpolish)!

And now you just wait for it to dry.

This method isn't only applicable to lighters. You could print on anything you shouldn't engrave or want color on, like your TI N-Spire, your phone case, etc.
In the near future I think I would like to try printing some logos. Maybe I can start selling some Gucci Chanel Rolex lighters...

I hope you learned! If you try this out, please post pictures of what you made!

I bought a watch

So this is going to be one of those not-so-technical posts.
I bought a watch this week at Sears.

I love this picture.

The gold watch on the far left is the one I've been wearing for a while. I practically built the thing.

I bought a fake Casio A159W watch, then bought a Casio F-91W and replaced the fake A159W with the innards from the F-91W.

So that way I have a gold watch that won't break if I submerse it in water or drop it on the ground.

I bought the oyster watch band to fit onto the watch. It's a pretty much a unique watch because I custom built it.

The silver watch on the top is a classic Casio A168W. Nothing too special about it.

The watch that I bought this week is the two tone analog watch to the left. That's what I bought for 60% off of $35, so I bought it for $15.

Chain shows up in everything.

I didn't realize this when I bought it, but the Decade brand watch looks extremely similar to...

a Rolex Datejust

http://www.rolex.com/watches/datejust/m116233-0149.html

a $12,000 watch. I was thrilled to realize this because I love buying knockoffs. It's flashy in a sort of ironic way.

Here are some main similarities:

• Fluted bezel (that gold ring around the whole watchface)
• twotone 
• Jubilee bracelet
• Gold crown (that thing to adjust the time)

Some main differences

• One is 1000x more expensive
• Decade's bracelet is not solid metal
• Decade's watch does not have date
• Decade's watch is based on quartz movement, while Rolex is mechanical
• Decade is just really cheap in all aspects. It's actually a terrible watch.

It's so cheap and that's why I love it. This Friday I didn't want to write college essays so I took some time to engrave my watch.

As seen on my Snapchat story:

I engraved my initials TSJW on the flip clip. I usually wear my watch on the inside of the wrist, and there's nothing to show off on the outside if I do this. So I felt like engraving my initials on the outside makes it feel less wrong wearing my watch on the inside.

It's so embarrassing to wear now.

So that's just some background on the watch. 

Whenever I buy something, I always end up thinking about taking it apart and modifying it (its inevitable).

A few days ago I got the watch wet and had to take it apart to dry out the moisture.
I realized how spacious the inside of the watch was... the quartz movement mechanism took up only an eight of the total space inside the watch... That gave me ideas.

The idea:

I honestly really don't like wearing analog watches. They give me a good sense of how much time is left in the day, but I spend at least five seconds reading it in order to understand what time it is actually. On a digital watch the numbers would just show up in X:XX form, but on this watch I have to spend a good amount of time decoding the placement of the hands.

Plus, the gold hands blend in with the gold face and everything is just so shiny and it makes it IMPOSSIBLE to read the time.

I love wearing digital watches, but they aren't flashy enough.

The Casio watch I have right now isn't solid metal: It's metal plated and then gold plated, which means that after wearing it for a year the gold wears off (it already has).

Literally no one sells a solid metal gold-plated digital watch at an affordable price.

So here's the idea: replace the quartz movement in the watch with a digital watch module.

Sorry, I don't have any picture of this right now (because taking apart watches is actually the worst), but imagine the Decade watch with a display like this:

Right now there are a few problems, and a few solutions that I've been thinking of.

• Fitting the innards from another digital watch into the Decade watch
• find a small enough watch, and 3D print a holder that will make it fit snuggly so it doesn't shift around.
• What do you do about the four buttons on a digital watch when you only have a hole for one crown on an analog watch case?
• I still need to figure this out.

For now I need to put off this project to concentrate on college applications, but I think this is a worthwhile project to look into. It'll probably be more difficult than my Zippo remote project, because this time I'm dealing with something a little more expensive than a lighter.

Hopefully when I come back to this idea a few months later I would have made some progress.

DIY Computer Monitor

Ever since finishing that robot I have not been getting many new ideas that excite me.
I am still in the still waters of creativity, so, no new projects yet.

The only thing that I have worked on since that time was adding a second monitor to my desk. It was a one day project; very easy.

I followed this Instructable mostly, and some other sources.

First I took the screen off of a broken laptop. 

Order the control board after talking with the eBay seller about specification.

Then wait a couple weeks for the board to arrive.

Then I plugged everything in and taped things together temporarily. I rested the screen on the corner of my desk like so.

I used the dead laptop's 12VDC adapter to power the screen.

After finding some time to work on it, I decided to replace my paper calender with the second monitor!

The control board only costs $35.

It has HDMI VGA DVI and some other audio plug stuff.

Most HDMI monitors cost $100 or more.

I have a sheet of plexi-glass holding everything together. The plexi-glass is secured to some scrap pinewood, which is epoxied to the back of the screen.

The epoxy is actually doing a really good job holding the wood to the plastic on the monitor

I also glued the inverter and control board to the back of the screen.

Not pictured here, but there is a stand I made that can hold screen. Since the screen is practically just a rectangle, I found a way to mount it onto a sort of stand if I ever wanted it off of the wall.

Overall this was a fun and easy project; I recommend it to anyone who has a dead laptop and needs an HDMI monitor for a low price. It's been a couple months since I built it, and it's been pretty consistent in displaying the right things.

Since installing the monitor I feel that my productivity has increased: it reduces the need to alt+tab to references, and also allows greater organization.

Highly recommends*