Resurrecting an old 2.5" Monitor Thread
NWCCTV
Posts: 3,629
Not sure how I stumbled upon this thread but I am glad I did. I picked a couple of these up 2 years ago with a bunch of Parallax items and they have been sitting ever since. So, did anyone actually get theirs going and make good use of it? @erco, I see you purchased several. Were you able to get them going? What are you using them on? And finally, does anyone have any to sell or trade?
Comments
At first, I thought I would use it quite a bit with the Propeller boards, but I tend to off load output serially (to my notebook computer) rather than have to set up a TV driver in my Propeller code. So it hasn't seen much use.
There may come a day when I will use it with my Hydra board if I get an itch to revisit computer graphics and computer animation.
I do keep it for the rainy day when I have an application that provides the brain way for a TV video output.
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Nonetheless, I came in handy about a month or two ago.
I needed a portable TV video to run down a failure in the cable TV service in my building. I used this with a small tuner box that converts the cable service to both TV video and VGA. It came in extremely handy as the building has 20 rooms on six floors that have individual cable service fed by coax through a bunch of splitters and two separate signal amplifiers.
If I had had to carry a conventional TV from floor to floor to run down the problem, it would have been a huge headache. I just took a 12VDC lead acid battery to power everything (the tuner box and the 2.5" display) and was able quickly run down the problem and to actually show the tenants that TV service was revived.
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My landlady in Taiwan hasn't raised my rent in 18 years (still less than $200 USD per month) and lets me keep a dog that likes to sleep by the front door. So it is very important to me to do these little chores that come up on an emergency basis to repay her kindness. If she had to call in a technician, they would likely want to make $100 USD for just showing up and there would be a lot of intrigue. These guys tend to try to sell replacing equipment that it perfectly good and make a big show to confuse the non-technical.
The whole problem boiled down to humidity corroding one of the 4 way splitters and I replaced it for about $2 USD. Plus, the tenants got their TV back the same night.
If you pay for shipping, I'll send you the untouched one.
I'm going larger as you can find broken DVD players with video input cheap at garage sales. I got a DVD player, with dual displays for 20 bucks yesterday at a garage sale. And the DVD worked!
Above in a yet to be completed project with one of the screens.
This case is just about the right size for a Propeller Proto Board with VGA and PS2 project. As you can see in the photo I had to remove a little of the PCB to get the board to fit up next to the panel but I didn't think this was much of a problem.
I purchased the case from MPJA but when I check the link I left at the bottom of post #9 in this thread, I find there is no longer an active product page for the enclosure. I see from the dead link the enclosure's part number was "17195 BX". I can't find this part number among the enclosures listed here.
I'm disappointed to see both of my favorite enclosures sold by MPJA are not longer available.
The other enclosure they sold which I thought worked well with Propeller projects was this one.
It was a good size to use with one of Rayman's 3.5" touchscreens.