Скачать или смотреть This miniature TV plays every episode of The Twilight Zone (Raspberry Pi4 project)

NOTE This is a total one-off and is not for sale. I own the Twilight Zone (both the original and 80s shows, and TZ The Movie, on Blu-ray and DVD, and I don't intend to make more of these TVs and/or sell the digital versions of the episodes that use for it 😉)

Here's my TZ01 Twilight Zone TV - a miniature retro TV that plays every episode of The Twilight Zone, and every episode of the 1980s series as an Easter egg.

This is my first rPi project and, as a non-coder, it was a super steep learning curve. If I'd had any idea how hard this project would be I might never have started. I bought a Luxa Retro TV Fire (a battery-operated flame effect fireplace thing) that really seemed sort of silly. I mean, do TVs generally have a fire inside them? Only perhaps in a post-apocalyptic setting... like the one that Henry Bemis stumbles into in Time Enough At Last. And that got me thinking...

I modified the case using all sorts of things including hardwood and brass. There's a whole backstory that I made to explain what it is and how it came to exist (after all, a TV that only tunes into the Twilight Zone is like something from, well, The Twilight Zone!).

I ended up writing a story called 'The Unwritten Episode' in the style of Rod Serling to explain this prop from an episode that never existed. I also then wrote the manual for the TV in the style of an in-universe manual right down to the science of the components inside - much of which is a mystery as is the central component: The Etheric Televisor, which is what allows telecasts from other dimensions to be received from the Ether. In my story, the inventor lives in a universe where the Twilight Zone never existed, and so his invention - intended to be the world's first miniaturised TV - yields unexpected results that put him face to face with Serling, a paratrooper who the inventor saw die in WWII. Anyway, I got lost in my own concept for this, and had to print out the book and manual. I think I've ended up with something that looks like a premium product from TWC and the like. So, why did I do this? Why not 😎 Then again, never again! 😅

Inside there's a Raspberry Pi4 with a Fanshim fitted, speakers, LEDs for internal lighting, pus-to-make buttons for the up, down and menu functions (connected to GPIO) and a rotary switch for the on/off and volume (again, GPIO). The whole thing is built on a heavily modified Retropie installation with Pixel Desktop installed as I didn't have the skill (I did try...) to do this whole thing as a headless installation (multiple issues with this, including some VLC functions I needed seemingly not being supported via command line). It boots from SD card, but the huge TZ ISO is on a 500GB SSD. The screen is a HDMI 8" IPS LCD Screen Kit (which had to be mounted upside down due to space constraints - which then caused huge issues with tearing video if the Pixel OS was inverted. Ended up having to use a line in cmdline.txt to resolve this.)
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/hd...

I also backed up the ISO, the artwork for the manual and the short story + my development notes and assets, and the SD card itself to several backups inside the case. I converted the old battery compartment into a convenient hideaway for a USB port in case I needed to connect a keyboard and mouse for any troubleshooting).

All in all, this project was began and given up on several times as solving one issue would always create three more. Got there in the end. Hope you enjoyed seeing it. 😀