Sat, 26 Apr 2025 17:03:00 UTC
i am writing this post on a small 5 inch crt. i intend to take this crt out of its current housing, a portable tv, and put it in a case more suited to general writing use. i intend to keep it portable and will put a rechargeable battery pack in it. as is the tv gets power from either a 12v wall adapter or a whole pile of C batteries. i dont know what the battery life is like with the C batteries but i cant imagine it was more than just a few hours. hopefully modern lithium batteries will do a better job. theres also this slight issue of the edges of the display being obscured by the current case. i should be able to get around that pretty easily by simply making the case not do that.
while i would love to put some sort of microcontroller in here with some bespoke writing software or whatever, i think its more practical for me to just shove a raspberry pi in it and call it good. i dont want this project to get abandoned because i got too ambitious on the software side. i can always do this at a later date. im not super thrilled with putting a whole computer in a device intended solely for the purpose of writing but i think i can get away with it by simply having it auto log in and open vim on boot. i already have an okay time using a small laptop solely for writing but the main reason that one was sitting idle is because it has a 32 bit processor and most people just dont really care about those anymore. software support is somewhat unreliable.
a problem i really hope to be able to solve is that i can hear the... is it the flyback transformer? am i remembering that right? idk, crt make high pitched noise and i dont like that. moreso, i would feel like an asshole bringing a crt into a library and annoying everyone else with the sound. i would like to deaden that sound with some sort of soundproofing on the inside of the case but the fact that its i think 15kHz will make that somewhat difficult. probably. watch me just put some fabric on the inside and the problem just goes away lol. surely someone has tackled this problem before. thats one really nice thing about the modern age, i can just look at what others have done to solve a problem and try that myself.
this project will probably take a bit but ill of course make more posts about it. im thinking about maybe making a video about it as well but im currently undecided if thats my style? ive made project videos in the past but theyve always been... a bit forced. in any case, there will be more coverage of the project at some point. itll also all be open sourced because of course. actually, i should look into if someone has already made a model of a frame for this tube. iirc they're pretty common specifically because of how many of these little tvs were made with the same tube. id much prefer if the tube were amber or green instead of white but eh, you get what you get. oh also the tv is monochrome. what more could you need?