It is an annoyance for some associates of our community, that it has become practically not possible to get a Television that is not a so-termed “smart” Television set. These units comprise a personal computer as well as the exhibit, and it boots into a locked-down OS with a person interface and a load of streaming apps. Can anything be carried out with them other than what their suppliers intended? [Nina Kalinina] has managed it, getting the mainboard from a discarded Lcd Television set and liberating the ARM Linux board in just.
On the board are all the inputs you’d count on from a Tv set, together with Ethernet, and a few of excess USB ports concealed in the WiFi interface. There’s a UART obtainable on the SCART connector, and accessing the U-boot menu is obtained by the uncommon means of sending a character to the infrared port employing a Palm Pilot. Incredibly the machine tree in the Flash was editable, so with the Linux OS accessed, the board was revealed as having a twin-main Novatek SoC.
This is reminiscent of the days when the new hotness was dragging a Linux box out of a dwelling router, and just as those were being immediately eclipsed by inexpensive boards this kind of as the Raspberry Pi, so could these Tv boards fulfill the identical fate. If, nonetheless, they can be made to travel a display screen with a thing more handy than the Tv interface then that may well improve, as who would not want to make an old intelligent Tv a bit extra handy?