This is an art piece that I did for a show in Spokane.
When the Riverspeak people were talking about this show I had planned to work on a pendulum design that I have been toying with for some time.. As a secondary piece I wanted to use this beautiful 50s television that is in my art space.
I looked around and found the TVout library for the Arduino (http://code.google.com/p/arduino-tvout/).The hardware is remarkably simple.
I grabbed the closest thing I had available ( one of Windell Oskay’s “evil mad scientist” megaxx8 boards ) and set up a prototype. I tested it on my girlfriends television and on an old apple IIe monitor that my friend Andrew gave me while I salvoed for an rf modulator and a matching transformer to convert the signal our from the composite to VHF channel 3/4. The resolution and the library was satisfyingly very early 80s. The only thing that I didn’t really like was the fact that the library hard codes some very specific assembly into the ouput bit manipulation. (otherwise I might have tested it out on a mega32u4 like the teensy).
I played around with the libraries primitives for a bit before I found out that the tv didn’t work. In the mean time I realized that my primary piece for the show was not going to come together in time. This became my primary piece (No pressure).
I went over to my friend Jon’s house for a different television and he had a couple of joysticks (it turned out the television didn’t work either). Now I just had to put it all together.
More photos of this project can be found on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/7175086@N05/sets/72157625047746744/
