Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Summary
-
1979 Panasonic’s mini-CRT is repurposed into a cybernetic platform: retro CRT meets modern hardware.
-
Raspberry Pi 5 and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery built into the TV for modern computing.
-
Mod maintains the original pop-up screen and antenna and is fully reversible; It connects through the antenna input.
Did you know that in the ’70s, people could buy a portable CRT TV to take with them wherever they went? It looks like the equivalent of a laptop from the time, except the body was huge and the TV wasn’t the best quality. but did It has a CRT display, and if you ask some retro hardware fans, that’s reason enough to fall in love with it.
Well, in the tried and true practice of DIY enthusiasts taking old hardware and turning it into something new, someone took an old 1979 Panasonic mini-CRT and turned it into a full-blown cyber rig. And while I can’t imagine you’ll be going to movies with it any time soon, it’s a great flexibility to take with you to the coffee shop.
This mini-CRT cyber platform brings together almost 50 years of technology
And it’s glorious
How he saw it HackadayLuconaute brought us this amazing project on YouTube. They took a 1979 Panasonic TR-545 and modified it to work with modern hardware. The Panasonic TR-545 had a power cord, but it could also run on several large batteries, and as you can imagine, it ate through them pretty quickly. Fortunately, this large battery bank meant Luconaute had plenty of room to add some modern touches.
First, since they weren’t interested in buying batteries by the pack, they installed a much more powerful rechargeable lithium-ion battery. They had enough space to also include a Raspberry Pi 5 to handle all the computing. Then they connected everything and voila: the coolest cyberdeck ever created.
If you have the feeling you’d see this in a 20th century cyberpunk movie, you’re not wrong:
This small pop-up CRT TV model appeared in the original Blade Runner movie. My goal was to preserve that charm, including the clunky pop-up screen and squeaky antenna, complementing them with a satisfying folding mechanical keyboard. The mod is completely reversible and simply inputs video and audio through the TV’s antenna input.
If you would like to read more about how Luconaute achieved this, they uploaded a 240 MB PDF to your Google Drive describing the process, which you can read at your leisure.
