You Can Now Connect ESP8266 Module to Your Color Television (Sort of)

You can do lots of things with ESP8266 WiFi modules, but CNLohr did something rather unexpected as he managed to use GPIO3/RX pin to broadcast NTSC signals first in black & white, and now in color, to his television’s channel 3.

ESP8266_Color_TV

On the hardware side, he did have to disconnect the WiFi antenna, and connected a wire antenna to GPIO3/RX pin. He then set I2S to run at 80 Mbps, and pushed data out using DMA buffers, so he could achieved the 61.25 MHz frequency required for NTSC luminance data, and the  color data, 3.579MHz higher up. Once the demo is running, you can alter it on the fly using a web neat interface. This is all explained on channel3’s github repository, as well as one a 15-minute video showing the capabilities and limitations, and explaining how you can play around with the parameters.

Via ESP8266COM’s Tweet.

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8 Comments
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olin
olin
8 years ago

I find it fascinating being able to bitbang few gpios to produce video signal.
Last year I did some trials with BBB and made something similar, here is the result:
https://youtu.be/cIl1TJGvT5M

onebir
onebir
8 years ago

So ESP8266 could emulate an early 80s computer without a video card?

olin
olin
8 years ago


I see, that’s what I was not sure about. So instead of the Wifi signal he broadcasts the videosignal on channel 30 frequency and use aerial antenna on his TV for reception. That’s even more impressive.

jl
jl
8 years ago

I’ve a naive question… what can we do with this ? any idea to make it useful in a project ?
thanks

rudi
8 years ago

@jl

you can do an udp-tv message service for arounded tv’s as cheap fast info panels.

😉

hope charles goes PAL too.
would start then “udp-tv-pair” with a second esp8266 as “tuner”-receiver 😉

Khadas VIM4 SBC