Watch a movie inspired by 1980s technology (we think war games, alien and ferris buehler holiday) and inevitably a scene of low-resolution text scrolling slowly across a burnt-out CRT screen.this SomePeopleCallMeJJ’s project (Jeff Jetton) sees a myriad of “magic mirrors” from another angle. Show breaking news with a 1980s twist using an old CCTV monitor and a Raspberry Pi.
not_magic_nor_a_mirror_retrostyle_newsfeed from r/raspberry_pi
retro feed This project uses a Raspberry Pi. I don’t know which model, but given that it outputs scrolling text, any model can do this. Even the Raspberry Pi Pico W works with the right accessories. The Pi is hooked up to an old CCTV monitor using a composite output, with a series of news and financial headlines, weather data, and the location of the International Space Station slowly scrolling across the screen. Instead of dumping everything at once, the project slowly fills in the text. Don Lancaster TV typewriter, using random horizontal parking positions to reduce screen burn-in. Everything is text based and super low resolution 80×24 characters.
So where does the data come from? The Raspberry Pi uses the Python requests library to scrape data, and each feed (news, finance, ISS, weather) has its own module. These modules are imported by the main newsfeed.py file, and with a little parsing and formatting, the data is output to his old-fashioned CCTV display.
Jetton is honest about the state of the project. this. “But we don’t mind this approach. It also says it can accomplish the project, which is what it did in 2020.
Jetton details the necessary steps Recreate the project via his GitHub repository. You’ll need to route the video output to the composite jack (all his 3.5 mm jacks except the first his Raspberry Pi) and change the boot him process to drop it into the terminal.
