Magnavox Console TV Ornament

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

I loved hodginsa's YouTube ornament, but I wanted to re-design the model to look like the console TVs of my childhood in the 1970s. We had the color version of this 1965 Magnavox TV in our livingroom: http://bit.ly/2YiBTjL. So that was my model.
I opted not to include the battery, so mine has to be powered by a USB power supply to work. I used this Raspberry Pi cable and power supply: https://amzn.to/2RrDMtj - which includes a power switch on the cable - which in turn allowed me to leave out the power switch from the TV. I otherwise used all the same parts from Sean's Instructable (http://bit.ly/2OQPvjm).
With the space that saved, I designed a PCB holder for the Pi and audio amplifier and a retaining ring for the speaker, because the idea of cramming everything in with foam tape assaulted my OCD. ;-)
To make printing easier, I split the model into several parts, which allowed me to print the outer case and base in Hatchbox wood PLA. The other parts were printed in plain brown PLA. All the parts are held together by tiny screws from this kit that I purchased from Amazon: https://amzn.to/34Qt4Ar.
Lastly, I wanted to add volume control, so I soldered a couple of buttons (https://amzn.to/352ORog) to GPIO pins 29 & 31 on the Pi and installed Pikeyd (https://github.com/mmoller2k/pikeyd) to emulate the mplayer volume keys "9" and "0."