I get shocked ⚡ from this unusual 4" Flat CRT

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement it's wednesday so it's well it's sort of a mail call video it's not a normal one so i'm not going to call it a midweek mini mail call this is something that i did get in the mail but it's something i ordered myself and it's crt based and it's kind of cool so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] so a few weeks ago i was browsing aliexpress as one does and i noticed something interesting that they had what's this it's a 12 volt 4.2 watt micro four inch crt black and white monitor vintage crt screen electronic picture tube and it really looks very similar to the sony watchman's and look at these here it even says sony right here it's really hard to see but it says sony on the neck board that one doesn't and there it is actually showing some kind of video and there's a wiring diagram and there it is held in someone's hand you know this really looks like the small crt that would be inside one of those old door cameras i don't know i think i'm going to buy this fast forward a few weeks and a package arrived in the mail from aliexpress and i think this is the crt that i ordered let's take a look there it is exactly as described definitely looks like it's new old stock it has plastic over the front lens here which is actually glass cool there's the deflection yoke we have the high voltage anode cap there and a little i don't know it's either a step up transformer or this is like a series of diodes that boosts the signal or we flip it over okay there's a pcb here right here it says toe show with a registered trademark vis-4001d version 1.0 there's a bunch of passives and we have some transistors some diodes and things placed around this board it's everything you need to make a crt this transistor right here is probably for the horizontal drive it's got a heat sink that kind of comes up onto the side of this plastic case we have an ic down there that's probably doing all the heavy lifting of you know everything that there is to do with uh crt lots of potentiometers here that one's labeled v-hold this one says shift on it vertical size right there and then this one here says key so keystone i have a feeling that means and i think that has to do with the fact that you can see the phosphor coating on the crt is actually hit at this angle here so you probably need some kind of adjustment of the entire picture so you get some decent geometry on this thing there are more pots here this one is focus this one is h size and then this one here is sub brightness and there's a pot hiding down there that is horizontal hold now if you think this type of a crt is familiar this flat crt it's because this was released in consumer products by sony and this right here is a sony watchman and they were the originators of this idea where the crt is mounted in the case this way and it shoots up and hits the phosphor at an angle like that and when you are looking at the image on a crt like this you're actually looking through the electron beam just like in a normal crt the electron beam is generated right here and it comes through deflection yoke here which has magnetic coils that move it back and forth it does all the scanning and normally in a regular crt it hits the back of the glass where the phosphor lights up and that phosphor lights up and you see it through the front of the glass well in this case that's the phosphor right there and it actually goes like this and then hits the phosphor at an angle and then the light shoots up towards her eyes so you are looking through the electron beam as it's passing through here and hitting onto the phosphor there and i think four inch might have been the largest size ever made of this style of crt we have this little watchman here from sony this one is model fd10a and manufactured december 1991 and then i have another one here which is actually larger you see it's its big brother and what's cool is it's not physically that much larger than its small brother here but yet has a much bigger crt this is model fd230 and on the bottom manufacturer january 1993. unfortunately on this one i am not seeing anything that gives away the date of when this thing was manufactured but i did see door phones in apartments and stuff like that that used modules like this probably definitely all the way through the 90s probably into the 2000s eventually lcds replaced uh these types of displays because they were brighter clear and of course in color but for a long time lcds were so poor performing you really could get better image out of something like this now i haven't answered the question of why i even bought this thing i think it was because why not it was only 20 bucks seemed like it would be a fun thing to play around with these two sony watchmens do work but neither of them have video input they have rf only and that's through an antenna so they're not really usable and i thought it would be fun to take something like this which has video input and see what it looks like hooked up to a retro computer the ad said vintage retro whatever whatever can this actually work as a little tiny crt based monochrome computer monitor let's find out so the first thing i need to do is figure out how to get this hooked up to power video input and also the brightness and contrast controls now i've printed out the little schematic that was on the listing didn't even come with any paperwork whatsoever so i'm glad at least this was available and i have saved a copy of this for future reference so the little crt has two connections it has a six pin right here and that's for a 50k potentiometer for brightness and a 1k potentiometer for contrast and it's just the very standard six pin connectors now it says 300 millimeters right here i wonder if this originally came with this kit and they didn't include it in the packaging it would have been nice and then down here is a four pin connector and it's got the video signal and two grounds and then it has dc input 12 volts to 15 volts it's almost like this was designed to be compatible with a car because the car you're going to see that voltage range while it's operating so we'll just give it 12 volts and hopefully that is sufficient here are the two connectors there's the four pin and there's the six pin and unfortunately even looking through all my parts bin i don't have this six pin connector i do have the four pin version and i've already gone ahead and made up a little harness here so we have the dc barrel jack there and we have the rca jack for the video input and i know it's kind of silly how short this is and i should have put a female connector on there but i actually don't have any female in-line connector rcas in fact you can see this is cut off an old cable here so i'll just have to couple this onto a longer cable i can just plug that right in there and at least now i can attempt to power this thing up before i go through the effort of trying to hook up the potentiometers to this other connector which i don't have so i have right here uh 12 volt 4 amp power supply see i wrote on it with uh one of my paint markers and it's a normal barrel jack so theoretically i can connect this up and this little tv should start working when i power this up i should be able to hear the deflection happening on here i don't expect to have any image whatsoever so here we go is this going to let out the magic smoke or is this gonna work well i don't hear anything actually when i pulled the power out i did hear a little noise out of it so i have a signal coming from my test pattern generator oh and i can't just connect that i need a coupler which i have right here so let's hook this up and see what we get i can hear it running i can now hear it actually running when you hook up a video signal to a crt there's like a 60 hertz hum that happens and there's also the 15 kilohertz frequency scan rate that's going on i'm still not seeing any kind of image but i'm not really surprised with the controls disconnected here let me pull the power out here and it does stop incidentally on the side of this high voltage device whatever it is we have a little bit of a model number here all right so for the brightness and the contrast controls right here i don't have that six pin connector so i'm gonna have to figure something out now what i did find one into my parts is i found two of these i think these are 24 turn potentiometers or 25 turn potentiometers and we have a 1k and we have a 50k part now looking at the wiring diagram you have the resistor here and then you have the center wipe and this is the variable part this middle pin so it's the second pin and the fifth pin well luckily these devices have exactly the same pin out so to speak where the wipe is the center pin here and then the two outside pins are the equivalent of the outside of the resistor there so i think what i can do is just remove this connector entirely and then hopefully i'll be able to solder these two parts directly onto the board i have gone ahead and bent the pins because i noticed that the stock configuration the pin spacing on here is not going to be appropriate for these so hopefully i can get it into the board with the pins bent this way incidentally if you have some of these and you aren't sure of the value of them what you can do is you can take your multimeter and you can measure the resistance between the two outside pins and that's going to tell you what value the potentiometer is so these potentiometers can go from 0 to whatever their rating is so this is one k so zero to one k or one thousand ohms so when you measure the outside two pins it's just going to say one thousand ohms and this one will say fifty thousand ohms that's just a quick way to quickly figure out what your potentiometers are all right so on the back of the board there's this plastic sheet which is held on by two screws on the sides here but then a piece of tape at the top it's nice to keep you from touching it and electrocuting yourself or sorting you know something by putting it down but the tape is a little janky so here is the connector i'm just gonna grab the desoldering iron and remove this well that was easy single-sided boards are almost a cinch so this just comes right out come on i know you want to there we go oops there's that connector i could always restore it back to the way it was at any time if i need to all right so looking at the diagram the 50k is towards the top of the board and this is the 50k here i'm gonna have to grab some tweezers to help insert these into the board so the 50k and the 1k here of course they're not sitting very well next to each other because i had to bend the pins over but that's fine you know this should work i just need to kind of position them i'll do one at a time so at least they're right up against each other for a little extra strength and maybe i'll just dab a little bit of hot glue in there once i'm done just to hold them in place all right these two potentiometers are installed and doesn't look too janky all right here we go power up with the pots installed look at that we have an image now i was completely anticipating since this came from china that this was going to be tuned for 50 hertz so the h hold here should be able to be adjusted oh it can't wait oh no there we go there we go i was going to say it can't be adjusted there was a little bit of glue on there there it is okay let me turn off the light so we can see this thing okay so we have an image but it's kind of blown out in the camera so let me just spend a moment and adjust this thing here let's see what i can do here i need some light to uh see what i'm doing a little bit all right so i've spent some time fiddling with this crt and i'm kind of shocked it's not nearly as bad as i thought it was going to be from a convergence well obviously it's not color but a focus or a dynamic whoa look at that how when i move my finger around it makes the picture move wait now whoa this has got to be static uh electricity i guess right because this plastic here hmm see what else does that okay so this is a a screwdriver that's slightly magnetic and that has an effect on it anyhow i'm going to adjust some of the controls and i have a little bit of a flashlight here just so i can see what i'm doing because i have the lights turned all the way down so this is the keystone one where it says key and unfortunately it's not completely even so if i get one side lined up like over here then this side is slightly out of alignment but it's it's not terrible this is the vertical size adjustment here and it seems like when you shrink the picture it sort of heads towards the top of the screen there's a control called shift which moves the whole picture up and down and it does have quite an effect on the geometry of this set as you adjust it as well now i found right off the bat now this is a matrix image where there's a little bit of a color bar at the top here and i found with the original settings probably the way it was for pal it was shifted like way up there and then i had the vertical size so i could it was taking up the whole screen but that color bar on the top was completely missing so i have to turn the shift all the way to one side just to get it to kind of show the entire picture and then vertical size if i adjust it yeah i can make it look good about like that we're looking at the sharpness ramps here and this is the highest resolution section of the screen and it's actually pretty sharp it's not bad at all this is the vertical hold control which works as you would expect i'm going to adjust the focus potentiometer here that definitely works let's see if i can get this a little better i guess you really can't expect miracles considering the electron beam is at such a oblique angle to the phosphor we have the horizontal size control so we can make this quite narrow but there is no potentiometer for adjustment is the phase so you can't shift the picture over to the side every adjustment seems to have an effect on other things like i'm stretching the picture here seems to get the keystone out of whack a little bit here we're looking at a grayscale ramp and the brightness of this little crt is pretty substantial now one of the faults as you could see when i have the lights on is the phosphor itself is quite a light color so when light shines on it it's pretty white and that washes out the picture really dramatically so i think the way this thing is set up is it really over drives the crt so you can have an image that's somewhat visible when someone like walks up to your camera on the front door i'm definitely going to go out and say that this thing has never been used it's definitely new old stock here and then the brightness and the contrast controls that i installed work properly there's a lot of turns involved in adjusting them and i had to turn the sub brightness down to kind of get things into spec and there was glue on there so someone had adjusted that at some point but uh yeah these absolutely work obviously we're getting a good image so with this convergence pattern displayed here i'm going to turn on the overhead light and we're going to see how washed out the picture actually becomes okay so you know what that's actually not too bad i know in the camera it looks really really washed out but i think if we were actually displaying some text well i think it would be readable it wouldn't be great but it would be definitely readable okay so you know what it's time for it's time for the peel let's get this plastic off of here oh yeah oh it's very stuck on there just get it started all the way across okay that's not satisfying but underneath there is absolutely the glass front of the crt so just like what you see when you're looking at the front of a regular computer monitor that this is this is the glass here of this crt isn't that cool i mean look how cool that is the electron beam is coming this way and it's hitting that phosphor on the back of the crt and we're seeing the light passing through the beam of course the beam is invisible but how cool and all of that fits into this little flat crt here now on the yoke right here there are two rings and these are most likely centering rings remember how i mentioned that there was no way to control the phase of this picture so if i shrink down the image here notice how it's like moved over to one side i think we can adjust these and then we can actually get this oh there's quite a lot of glue on here let me try to break this glue all right i managed to loosen these up and these have dramatic effect on the picture i'm pretty shocked actually on a regular crt they do not move the image quite so much but clearly the oblique angle that this thing is projecting causes uh quite a bit of movement on this so there are two rings and they can be moved separately and that moves the image around up down left right and kind of diagonally and centered and kind of a round so i'm going to get this as centered as i can like that and now when i widen the image okay it's definitely a bit more in center let me adjust this keystone can control didn't really help there still a little out of whack but not terribly and there we go i think it's probably about as good as it's gonna get right now there's definitely some distortion down there all of these boxes should be exactly the same size and you definitely see how they're not like down here there's something going on in the corner the keystone is not even between the left and right there's definitely things are a little closer together in this part of the screen it's just overall not great but really this was designed for use in a door phone and they didn't really care no one was going to be looking at the geometry of this crt in that door phone application okay time to test what everyone wants to see will this work with the retro computer the flattest little crt ever used on an apple 2c perhaps i have the 2c ready to go i'm going to place this on top of the computer and i'm going to put a mouse pad on here i just don't fully trust that sketchy piece of plastic there to not burn a hole or something in the top of the computer and i have a little power supply here another one i have run my apple 2c off of a 12 volt power supply and i'm actually using the same power supply that i was powering the monitor from this four amp one that powers the 2c without issue so i'm going to use a a one amp a power supply for the little tv here a little monitor okay that's connected and we have an image and here we go okay so did you see that that was the crt being affected by the disk drive motor how hilarious i moved the monitor off to the side of the computer so that i wouldn't potentially mess up the disc i stuck in there with the magnetic field coming out of the crt and i've turned off the overhead light so we can see this a little bit better and one of the issues about this particular analog driver board we see here is that it really really amps up the brightness here so this background which should be black is very gray now i'm going to turn the sub brightness control down so that goes away all right i think i lock the focus so it should not be hunting anymore so turning down the sub brightness and i know you can't see what i'm pointing at that had a dramatic effect and you know what this is it's actually it's actually quite readable that is insane oh just touching the screen with my finger obviously there's some static or something on my finger the bottom syntax error is nice and crisp and i'm pointing to it you can't see it so i'm not going to point to it the bottom syntax error down at the bottom where i'm typing the b very sharp but up at the top where i have that line of garbage and then syntax error it's definitely losing focus now let me try adjusting the focus control maybe i can split the difference get the top oh you know what that's better okay the top's a little bit better now and the bottom is even sharper that is shocking okay i'm going to run the diagnostics so that we can move the picture into an appropriate position here because i gotta fiddle with the controls just for the apple 2c specifically now remember how i mentioned to shift the picture over to the side i have to adjust those rings on the crt there's no control for that but overall i am totally shocked how clear this is let's boot the computer and go to 80 columns mode pr number three this is a test of 80 column mode on the apple 2c this is actually quite readable i am completely amazed i mean no one ever would have thought that this thing no one would have ever thought that this thing would actually be able to display text in a readable fashion i am just amazed completely completely amazed there it is perfectly sharp image it looks really good all those those vertical lines they look amazing i'm i'm really shocked if you can tell by my voice i am kind of blown away at this thing it works so much better than i ever would have anticipated that this actually works i didn't realize i wasn't fully zoomed up on the camera so i zoomed in a little bit more look at that looks really really nice please enter your name adrienne look at the sharpness look at how sharp that is now what's interesting is you notice that this area which should be black sort of has a grayish tint to it i can see that with my eyes as well and i think that's not actually this electron beam lighting up that area of the phosphor i think that's just like spillover from the light from this area just making its way over to there i'm going to turn down the sub-brightness control just to see if that has an effect yeah it doesn't really actually you know what no maybe that is being lit up oh it's really hard to tell to be honest if i exit out of the game here we go back to just text here when i turn the sub brightness up that right now is the background being lit up by the electron beam if i turn this down just to where it's not anymore like that it really is nice and dark now if we go to gr and we type text we're going to get a full screen and now again it looks like it's being lit up i don't think it is i really feel like that is probably just some kind of spillover i'm not i'm just not totally sure though so i'm going to turn the light back on so we can see if it really washes out and yeah it really really washes out i unlocked the exposure on the camera it looks not great in the camera but it also looks not great to my eye it is really just the light lighting up the phosphor it just has a very light coating to it don't know why that is why couldn't they have used something darker or maybe that's where how all crts look and the glass itself is tinted to darken it i'm not sure if anyone knows about why this crt has such light phosphor versus other black and white crts i'd love to hear about that in the comment section and now i just turned on my bench overhead light which really really washes out the picture because the light is coming down like this and over my head you can just see the reflection of the light above my head so yeah not not ideal in that regard so i'm very curious what voltage this crt runs at and there's a little plastic trim piece here which i'm going to take off which should allow me to stick my high voltage probe under the anode cap maybe it's a little tiny miniature anode cap so it really uh may not may not allow that thing to go in there let's see does this come off or is it glued on what's happening here exactly okay it was glued on oh oh that's not good that was the ground i gotta unplug the power so this is the ground and it sticks onto the crt there there's a diagram and i didn't realize that that's actually what's holding that on and i shouldn't have disconnected that while this was running so right here is the little high voltage anode cap a little tiny thing there i'm going to get my probe and stick it under there now i'm trying to get a reading off the probe and i can't just because i have to have that wire attached there for the dag oh i just got a big shock yeah ouch oh yep that's what happens i got a couple shocks there that's what happens when the ground is not properly attached let's get that off of there so i don't think this was actually making contact even with that stuck on there [Laughter] all right the final test of this little crt is to see how much current it draws from 12 volts so i have it hooked up here to my bench power supply so i'm going to send it 12 volts i do have a video signal connected from the test pattern generator let me power this on there is the image it came right up look at that distortion and as you see here we're getting 289 milliamps or so at 12 volts which with a simple calculation should allow us to figure out the watts 3.468 watts the aliexpress listing said it was about four and a half watts so pretty close one final thought about this the distortion that is in the bottom corner here it seems to be worse than any of the other distortion on this although this whole side is not great i wonder if there's like some magnetism something is magnetized slightly and maybe putting a a little magnet or some kind of a little strip on here could help correct some of these geometry issues if i have a screwdriver this orientation it shifts the picture down and if i put it in this orientation it shifts the picture up next what i'd like to try is i'm going to turn down the voltage so we're down to 11.4 it's definitely having an effect it's weird each time i lower the voltage it it sort of makes the picture roll it's still running at 10.4 volts struggling though it's really struggling what about if we turn it up so 12 volts okay anything over 12 volts doesn't seem to really have an effect anymore so it's obviously happy running at 12 volts and actually interesting is the current draw even at 13 volts is about the same so that means this thing is dissipating the additional voltage as heat but it seems like 12 volts is the perfect sweet spot for it so there we go that's this little 21.4 inch flat crt all the way from aliexpress i am very impressed with this thing i don't think there's a real practical use for it but it's still cool would i recommend people running out and buying these probably not it's really nothing you can do with these things unless you can think of a cool project maybe integrate these into a retro computer case somehow and you could have an actual crt and not just rely on a boring lcd panel so it's more interesting than anything else but really really not practical it was still fun to play around with though and i think if anything it just looks really cool even when it's powered off so if you enjoyed this video i'd appreciate a thumbs up but if you didn't know what to do thanks to all my patrons i really appreciate their names are scrolling up the side of the screen now and if you want to become a patron yourself you can do so all you need to do is check the description below and there is a link put your comments down below if you so desire and don't forget to check out my second channel i post interesting videos there all the time and that is going to be it so stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 141,735

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Id: 8cU9x23w4YE

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EpicAftertaste]

Neat

This is the link to Alie

https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005002000382238.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.2979810bdcV8CW&algo\_pvid=059ef257-d999-4f89-bb08-2de98462be59&algo\_exp\_id=059ef257-d999-4f89-bb08-2de98462be59-0&pdp\_ext\_f=%7B%22sku\_id%22%3A%2212000018370474487%22%7D

[u/Talulabelle]

I just linked to these in another discussion. I could definitely see using one in a build soon. I was thinking of something very 'old school' Cyberdeck, like with a handle and weird controls just to make something more like you'd see in a sourcebook for the old Role Playing games.

For $20, you really can't go wrong.

[u/butrejp]

I've been waiting for one to come from aliexpress for a good while, got the email that it's in the country this morning so I'll probably get it within a week or two and get started.