UNDERSTANDING THE TELEVISION TECHNOLOGY

Before diving into -- Understanding the modern television, it is often useful to learn about its invention and what main ideas motivated its invention. So, a little bit of history then:

In 1884, German inventor Paul Nipkow got a patent for a mechanical device that could scan a picture. The device included a vertical rotating disc in which there were holes arranged in a spiral form (shown below).

                                           
                                              (few holes are shown for clarity)



When a picture was projected against the disc, it was only possible for the light from one point at a
time to penetrate the disc and to reach a photosensitive cell located on the other side of the disc. By spinning the disc, the light that penetrated the disc described the picture point by point. After one turn of the disc, the complete picture had been scanned. The electrical signal produced by the photosensitive cell is a primitive video signal. At the receiver end, a similar rotating disc with holes is used. This receiver disc rotates with the same speed as the transmitting disc. An electrical source of light that is controlled by the video signal is located behind the receiver disc. A picture can now be viewed in front of the receiver disc.

Nipkow never succeeded in putting his TV system into practice. The electronic components required to do so were simply not available at the time of his invention.

It was the Englishman John Logie Baird who implemented the first cameras and TV sets that really worked, in the 1920s.

Here is video showing his Mechanical TV:

Modern televisions:

(This post would be completed soon, meanwhile I need to learn about the functioning of these T.V's!)

MAKING A VIDEO GAME CONSOLE

This post is intended to explain you how to make your own game console without spending too much money and learn electronics behind its creation. It requires several different parts which you can buy from : http://www.xgamestation.com/view_product.php?id=34
However instead of buying them, I decided to make something similar-that uses same concepts and offers same functionality-on a prototyping board.
The schematic of XGameStation pico edition :

As of now, I am still learning how to make it possible ,so bear with me - it would get completed very soon :)

RASPBERRY PI AS FM TRANSMITTER

This hack was recently developed by some students at Imperial College Robotics Society at London. This is a very simple hack that requires minimum piece of hardware. All you need is raspberry pi, FM radio and a bare piece of wire to act as antenna. Just follow the procedures explained at their website:

http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter

In fact, it's not just transmitting at the frequency -set using the command : sudo ./pifm sound.wav 100.0 -but also it is radiating at some other frequencies as well. I don't know the reason for this but this event was reported by various students when they used spectrum analyzer on radio frequencies.

Here are the photos showing how I did this project:

There is certainly no need to mount the antenna right on top of the pin, an external breadboard (with antenna attached) would have worked fine.