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Retro IBM 12″ VGA monitor (8512) attached to a Raspberry Pi! |
2015-01-11T17:27:58+00:00 |
Bugs |
post |
/retro-ibm-12-vga-monitor-8512-attached-to-a-raspberry-pi/ |
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 One of our members, James Muirhead, managed to get a classic IBM monitor working with his Raspberr pi! He says:
I’ve had this monitor knocking about in the attic (used for years in the 90s) for years and I’ve wanted to do something like this. It’s taken me a while to get an HDMI to VGA adapter which actually supports 640×480 @ 60Hz.
I was partly doing this for estetic reason (it’s awesomely retro) and partly because it’s an old device I wanted to breath new life into. I always try to reuse before recycling.
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=4
hdmi_drive=2 (if audio supported by VGA adapter).
When it first started I saw nothing but green snow. I thought it wasn’t working so I tried all the different relevent settings. It however turned out that I needed to restart the Pi somehow, whether by bridging the reset pins (this requirtes a Revision 2 Raspberry Pi), or by using sudo reboot from SSH command line (via network).
If I were to make this a perfamant build (I don’t have the desk space or the spare Pi right now).
- I will likely wire a Solid State Relay to control power to the monitor from a pin on the GPIO (this monitor is way too early for automatic power control).
- I would also probably create some from of circuit to reset the Raspberry Pi automatically (to avoid green snow). Either using a 555N in monostable mode or a suitably programmed ATtiny45/85.