A Single Board Computer From A TV

It is an annoyance for some members of our local community, that it has become pretty much extremely hard to obtain a Television which is not a so-referred to as “smart” Television. These units include a pc as effectively as the display, and it boots into a locked-down OS with a user interface and a load of streaming apps. Can nearly anything be finished with them other than what their brands supposed? [Nina Kalinina] has managed it, having the mainboard from a discarded Liquid crystal display Television set and liberating the ARM Linux board within.

On the board are all the inputs you’d hope from a Tv, alongside with Ethernet, and a couple of excess USB ports concealed in the WiFi interface. There’s a UART available on the SCART connector, and accessing the U-boot menu is obtained by the strange indicates of sending a character to the infrared port applying a Palm Pilot. Amazingly the gadget tree in the Flash was editable, so with the Linux OS accessed, the board was unveiled as obtaining a dual-main Novatek SoC.

This is reminiscent of the days when the new hotness was dragging a Linux box out of a household router, and just as all those were being rapidly eclipsed by inexpensive boards these types of as the Raspberry Pi, so could these Television set boards meet up with the identical fate. If, even so, they can be produced to push a display screen with some thing additional valuable than the Television set interface then that might modify, as who would not want to make an aged clever Television a little bit far more beneficial?