Holiday gift idea. Tiger "TV NOW" $25 really cool.
Bean
Posts: 8,129
My son's birthday is Dec 3rd. And I got him one of these to record his favorite movies on when we travel. For $25 (Wal-Mart) I've got to say I'm very impressed.
Basically you connect this to your DVD player or cable box or whatever video output device you want to record from. The "TV Now" will record the program, then you can play it back on the build-in LCD (only). The quality is not that great, (okay it's not even good) but for $25 it is better than I thought it would be. It even has a timer so you can start recording upto 24 hours later, then record for xxx minutes.
Oh, and it will record just music too. Compresses it on the fly. Just connect it·to your CD player or whatever.
3" color LCD (backlight)
128M internal memory (records about an hour)
Uses up to 2G SD cards (must be high speed)
Uses 4 AAA batteries (too bad they did use AA)
Comes with the AC adapter too.
You've got to wonder HOW they can sell this for $25. I have no idea. But it is really cool.
Just thought I would pass on a cool high-tech toy for those who are still looking.
Here is a link http://www.hasbro.com/tiger/default.cfm?page=browse&product_id=18617
Cons:
· Cannot see or hear·the video until you start recording
· Cannot turn down the volume while recording
· Uses AAA batteries
Bean.
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Cheap used 4-digit LED display with driver IC·www.hc4led.com
Low power SD Data Logger www.sddatalogger.com
SX-Video Display Modules www.sxvm.com
Stuff I'm selling on ebay http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZhittconsultingQQhtZ-1
"People who are willing to trade their freedom for·security deserve neither and will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
Post Edited (Bean (Hitt Consulting)) : 12/2/2006 10:15:00 PM GMT
Basically you connect this to your DVD player or cable box or whatever video output device you want to record from. The "TV Now" will record the program, then you can play it back on the build-in LCD (only). The quality is not that great, (okay it's not even good) but for $25 it is better than I thought it would be. It even has a timer so you can start recording upto 24 hours later, then record for xxx minutes.
Oh, and it will record just music too. Compresses it on the fly. Just connect it·to your CD player or whatever.
3" color LCD (backlight)
128M internal memory (records about an hour)
Uses up to 2G SD cards (must be high speed)
Uses 4 AAA batteries (too bad they did use AA)
Comes with the AC adapter too.
You've got to wonder HOW they can sell this for $25. I have no idea. But it is really cool.
Just thought I would pass on a cool high-tech toy for those who are still looking.
Here is a link http://www.hasbro.com/tiger/default.cfm?page=browse&product_id=18617
Cons:
· Cannot see or hear·the video until you start recording
· Cannot turn down the volume while recording
· Uses AAA batteries
Bean.
·
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Cheap used 4-digit LED display with driver IC·www.hc4led.com
Low power SD Data Logger www.sddatalogger.com
SX-Video Display Modules www.sxvm.com
Stuff I'm selling on ebay http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZhittconsultingQQhtZ-1
"People who are willing to trade their freedom for·security deserve neither and will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
Post Edited (Bean (Hitt Consulting)) : 12/2/2006 10:15:00 PM GMT
Comments
Have you tried connecting this device to the Propeller video output? 'Just wondering how clear the characters are in TV-text, for example. Also, can it be used as a monitor, or are the record and playback functions completely separate?
-Phil
Even moderate size text on movies (DVD Menus) cannot be read.
Remember this thing records over 60 minutes of video and audio on 128Meg of memory.
I think I read the display resolution is something like 140x80.
Bean.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Cheap used 4-digit LED display with driver IC·www.hc4led.com
Low power SD Data Logger www.sddatalogger.com
SX-Video Display Modules www.sxvm.com
Stuff I'm selling on ebay http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZhittconsultingQQhtZ-1
"People who are willing to trade their freedom for·security deserve neither and will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
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There is a blank plate that has a USB connector behind it.
Bean.
▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Cheap used 4-digit LED display with driver IC·www.hc4led.com
Low power SD Data Logger www.sddatalogger.com
SX-Video Display Modules www.sxvm.com
Stuff I'm selling on ebay http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZhittconsultingQQhtZ-1
"People who are willing to trade their freedom for·security deserve neither and will lose both." Benjamin Franklin
·
I almost passed it up because I am looking for an LCD TV for my Propeller suitcase computer, and I thought "I need a TV, not a TV recorder". But then I thought, that hopefully, this thing will display the video before it records it, in which case I would just keep it in "passive" mode to display the input. I haven't had a chance to find out yet whether or not it can display TV without recording it first, because I don't have a source of video input to try it on. All of my stuff's in storage, including my Propellers, and I'm staying at a Professor's house while he's away and -guess what- he gets his TV direct from the F-connector cable, instead of from a Satellite box with RCA jacks.
[noparse][[/noparse]Edit: I just realized I missed the part in Ed's post about not being able to see the output until after it records. Bummer. But maybe we can still hack the firmware inside it.]
I received a $25 Walmart gift card for Christmas, but the local walmart is small and crappy, so I hadn't been able to find a single cool geek toy in 2 days of searching. I think this TV now player must have been recently returned after Christmas, because it wasn't there yesterday. I was blown away when I saw the price. $25 geek toy + $25 gift card = me very happy.
Since I don't have a video source to record, I did what any true geek must do with a new toy and opened it up. There are surprisingly few chips inside it; two are obviously the memory chips, and the third is an ARM processor. I'm not an expert on ARM processors (though I wish more and more every day that I was!) but here are the markings on the chip, so that you guys don't have to open up your TV NOW to find this out:
SHARP
LH79524-NOE
100 AC
0520 KOREA
114500A0
ARM
If we could figure out how to hack the firmware so that it loads code off an SD card, this could make a hell of a portable gaming console. It even has buttons in the same place as a Sega Game Gear, and I bet it is just as powerful. True, the buttons aren't perfectly suited to fast action, but they are usable and real game consoles have been released with a worse interface that this (*cough*, Intellivision, *cough*).
I was really shocked at the good quality of the device. It has a very solid feel to it and little nonsense. Inside, the boards are something of a mess until you realize that it is actually a neat trick to fit 7 inches of board into 6 inches of device - they chopped the board in 3 pieces and overlapped it. It really is completely stuffed in there; I expected more wasted space in a toy and there isn't any. I don't know whether to be less impressed with the quality of the device because of the way everything is hacked together (physically) to make the boards fit, or impressed that they pulled it off. One thing that does hint of further quality is that the 3 boards are perfectly partitioned in function - there is a power supply board, an audio/video board, and a CPU board, and they did a good job, it seems, of keeping the functionality modular, which is good engineering. Anyhow Tiger must have someone or some people over there that are really brilliant. This is a hell of a neat device.
And is this an ORGANIC LED DISPLAY? I haven't seen one before but I think this must be; the package said this is a "Class 1 LED device", which raised my eyebrow. In any case it looks much more like an old TV with big RGB pixels. Although I didn't have a video source to record, I thought the menus were really neat. The color halos around the text bring me right back to my CGA/Tandy graphics days. Pure retro! I love it.
I think that tomorrow I will have to make a road trip to another walmart and buy 1 or 2 more of these things for hacking. I need to know if it displays video input directly. Even if the resolution is lower than what would be ideal for text with the propeller, I can do my games with it, and of course if we could program the internal ARM processor directly, we wouldn't need to worry about what it does to video signals.
P.S. Yep, that's a USB port they hid. I wonder why they covered it up? Stupid marketing people, leave our geek toys unneutered! As soon as I get all the loose screws back into my TV NOW, I'm going to plug it into the USB port on my computer and see if anything happens.
Now the question is, when they nerfed the USB port on it, how much trouble did they go to? It was too much to hope for that all they did was put in the silly plastic plug - then all you would have to do to turn a $25 video player into a $125 one is pull out a plug. Nope, that isn't enough. But, here's the interesting thing: I watched the USB devices list in control panel when I plugged it in, and the TV NOW definitely gets detected as "Unknown Device". So they left it hooked up electrically, and it is even responding to device listings - it just isn't accessed in the firmware.
I tried downloading the software for the VuGo, which I found at this site: http://vugo.com/downloadSoftware.php
LMAO, the Mac download for the software is only 3.3 Mb, while the Windows download of the software is 70 Mb. Huh? Nearly two orders of magnitude difference in size? I don't know but somehow I don't think I'm getting any more functionality in my 70 Mb windows version than the Mac people are getting. I do know that the Windows version includes COM interop dlls, .NET thingees, and old MFC Visual C++ DLLs all together. Most people choose to use 1 or 2 of those technologies together to make a windows app. I've never seen anything combine all three quite the way they did. If you have .NET, you theoretically don't need the other two - unless they just wrote a .NET frontend for legacy code they don't understand, which I'm sure is the case.
I was hoping that I could trick the VuGo software into thinking that my TV Now was just a VuGo with corrupted firmware. It should have then downloaded the VuGo firmware and I would laugh like a mad scientist. Unfortunately, you can save yourself the trouble of downloading the 70 MB file because it doesn't work - the VuGo software never detects the TV Now. Oh well, I didn't really want a VuGo, either. I just want to be able to download my own firmware. Hmmm... I need a program that lets me probe a USB device manually. Maybe I can figure out the access codes to send new firmware to this thing myself.
Here is a picture of the inside of the unit.
The processor reads the state on some of its pins to determine what type of boot to do. Right now it must be set to boot from Flash. However, there is also a setting that lets it boot from a UART, using XMODEM protocol. If you could override the pins to read "UART", and connect a computer serial port / ARM programmer to the correct pins on the processor, then maybe you could use an off-the-shelf ARM development IDE to download code into the RAM of the ARM chip.
Once you have your code in the processor's RAM, then you could instruct the processor to dump the contents of flash over the serial port connection, where you could analyze it and patch it, and then download it back. That way you wouldn't have to rewrite all the firmware from scratch, you could just patch the parts you want to.
At least, I think all that would work.
Man, I really need to get an ARM trainer board and learn this stuff.
Well I retrieved my suitcase computer from storage so I could test the TV NOW with the video out from the propeller. Graphics demos did not work with it, but TV Text demos (including Mike's OS) did work. I think it has to do with interleaved/not interleaved - appartently the TV NOW only supports one and not the other. If you try to view the wrong one, the display just shows garbage.
Bean is quite right, it is 100% impossible to read video text on this thing. Despite the low resolution, I think the real limiting factor is that it does not show each frame of video until it has gone through their compression algorithm. That's why you can't see the video input until you start recording - I doubt they ever generate a full frame bitmap at all, but rather compress each line on the fly as it comes in, then they decompress it to let you see the video as its recording. They have a weird algorithm that seems to like to blank out horizontal lines - dashes and underscores in text do not show up at all, but vertical bars do, while diagonal lines (slashes) show up half as bright. Entirely unsuitable for text compression.
This thing would be neat if I could reprogram it, but it is not going to work as my long sought after portable TV display for my suitcase computer. I guess I'll have to just pony up the dough for a "real" LCD TV.
If I knew more about the interface for the display, I might consider ripping the entire guts out of this thing, ARM and all, and replacing it with a Propeller. At least I know how to program that! And I could stick a DOSOnChip module in it too, underneath the access hatch for the SD card, so that I could still write SD cards.
The LCD control circuitry is inside the ARM CPU chip itself, so there wasn't an easy way to hack off the display & controller and use that. That being said, I'm sure the Propeller could drive the display directly if you connected it manually - most likely you would have to clock in pixel data 8 bits at a time at some prescribed frequency and generate other goofy signals as well. It would certainly require some fine soldering to connect it up. Hopefully that's the interface; if the interface is rows and columns, forget about it; that would be 128 column wires plus 96 row wires to solder.
I also tried various methods to hack the device through its USB port or SD slot, but to no success. The USB port is plugged by Tiger, and it is disabled in the software but the hardware portion of the USB port does work because when you plug it in, Windows XP recognizes an unknown device. I tried several methods to unlock it through using software for other similar media players, but none of them recognized the TV Now and the software is so loaded with DRM that it won't work with anything but the exact serial number of the device it is designed for.
Thanks for bringing up this matter, though, because it reminded me that there is an SD port on the TV Now; about the only benefit I think I will get from the purchase is that I'm going to desolder the SD card slot from the TV Now and solder it onto my blank experimenter card and have an SD slot for my Hydra.