Weather Radio/TV into Serial Terminal

I had found a Weather Radio/TV the other day and yesterday I posted about the CD5151CP IC and how to get Composite Video.

When I stripped down the Radio/TV it had two huge boards in it. One looked like it had all of the Radio stuff and the other had all of the TV guts. However I didn’t know if both boards were needed or not. I ran into this issue when I tried to do the same project with an old Karaoke Machine. It had many different boards and I needed to use them all for the TV.

Anyway, I spent a couple of days looking at the main board that had the TV circuity and it seemed everything was there except for Audio. So this morning I powered it up.

I used my bench supply to power it up and at 8 Volts it was using 500mA of current.

I need to discharge it and add the Composite modification. I also need to figure out if I will go the Raspberry Pi Zero or a ASCII Video Terminal board. Not to mention 3D printing some parts and building a case for it.

If I go the Raspberry Pi route I can use this more then just a serial terminal and use it kinda like a IP Terminal. I have the ASCII Video Terminal but I think the Composite video isn’t working.

The shortest way to get a modern Linux system to be a Serial Terminal host is pretty easy. Chances are a USB to Serial Adapter is needed. Either a Null Modem cable or adapter is needed as well. Connect the USB to Serial adapter and issue this command.

ls /dev/*USB*

From there it should come back to something like this.

ls /dev/*USB*
/dev/ttyUSB0

It might be different depending on the adapter or something like ttyUSB1.

Now to enable the getty service for terminal connections.

sudo systemctl enable serial-getty@ttyUSB0.service

Just change the part in BOLD to match your USB to Serial Adapter. Hook up the terminal to the adapter and power it up. You should be greeted with a Login prompt from the Host System.

This weekend I’ll fire up the 3D printer and today I’ll try and find something for a case.