Ummm.... Let's see....
It started life as a Citizen TA80-0A LCD TV/AM/FM Radio/tape player. I would pose a pic but I couldn't even find this thing on Google or elsewhere.... That should give you an idea of how old it is.... I spontaneously got an idea of using it to display temps and such. I opened up the box (with the help of a high-speed carbon drill bit because I couldn't find the right screwdriver until AFTER I finished the project
) and found that it had 2 major circuit boards. It had a HUGE board that ran the full length of the box that contained the audio amplifier circuit, the tape player, and the radio. The TV tuner was on a smaller seperate board with the LCD controller chip. Connecting the main board and the TV board was a 12-wire ribbon cable. Through a LOOOONG process of multimeter testing, I figured out what all the wires did.
Looking at the back of the TV board, the left side of the connector is Pin 1 and the right side of the connector is Pin 12.
Pins 1,3 + 9VDC
pins 2,4 - 9VDC
These were the only ones I really needed, but for the heck of it I checked out the rest and wrote them down, but I can't find the piece of paper... It's probably with my screwdriver...
After successfully getting the TV to turn on while applying power, I then set about finding out how to get it to accept line-in. Simply hooking a VCR to the line-out of my video card and then hooking its RF-out to the TV wouldn't work, as the TV tuner was partially broken and wouldn't tune anything below channel 6. The solution was rediculously easy to figure out but it still took me a while because it was hidden. On the back of the card (the side facing the back of the TV) there were 2 pins, labeled "DET" and "GND". It didn't take much experimentation to find out that this was its line-in. So much for complicated pinout lookup...
After successfully determining that the line-in worked (by hooking it up to my Gamecube
) I had to figure out how to get the video card to detect the TV. This took a LOT of trial-and-error. I learned that video cards have a sensor on Line-Out to detect whether or not there is a TV attached. The sensor detects current draw on the line-out cable. If the current draw is over a certain level, then there is a TV attached. Unfortunately, my TV had almost NO conductivity across the line-in port, so it couldn't draw a current. My challenge was to figure out how to make a current draw across the line-out while not drawing so much curent that it robbed the signal from the TV. After a long process of trial-and-error, I found the best way to do this was to connect 2 68-Ohm resistors in parallel with each other and the circuit. This caused the TV to be detected b the vidcard on startup. After configuring Samurize, it worked like a charm. All these steps will probably work for you, if you can find a Citizen TA80-0A anywheres...
It would be MUCH easier with a newer TV....
After rereading this post, I declare it unreadable and unfit for human consumption, as it is far too technical and anyone who reads it is likely to have their head explode from sheer incomprensability.
Was that detailed enough for ya??
