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T35TP4TT3RN

T35TP4TT3RN

T35TP4TT3RN (aka TEST PATTERN) is a piece I created for Maker Faire Milwaukee in 2016. It consists of a Raspberry Pi single board computer connected to an old Sony broadcast monitor. (I got the monitor from another member of Milwaukee Makerspace who was getting rid of old equipment.)

T35TP4TT3RN

As I often do, I wanted to contrast old hardware with modern hardware. I ended up using a Raspberry Pi Model B which has composite video out via an RCA jack. I used an RCA to BNC adapter to connect to the monitor. The display is a whopping 640×480 pixels.

T35TP4TT3RN

I used the Raspberry Pi Slideshow technique and with most installations, I tried to do a good amount of testing beforehand, letting it run for days at a time. I came across an issue where the system would freeze, and it would get stuck on an image. I contemplated switching to display of a video, but really wanted to avoid that, so I set a cron job to reboot the Pi every 30 minutes. I figured that if someone saw the screen during reboot it would be an extra BTS sort of treat. (The Pi boots very fast.)

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I did end up altering the monitor a bit. I removed the case and broke out a bit of the battery compartment so I could slide the Pi and extra cable into the battery slots. Since I’ll probably never own the batteries for this unit, hacking it seemed like a no-loss situation.

Here’s a collection of a few of the test patterns that were displayed.

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