BorisDigital built a 1990s TV master control room out of Raspberry Pis so he could watch his tube TVs outside

“Initially I just wanted a transmitter so I could watch my tube TVs outside, but it grew into an entire rack of equipment,” Boris writes in the video’s description. The model was a master control room he worked in during the early 1990s. “That room contained hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment whose functionality I replicated for a few hundred dollars.”

The GitHub repo, linked from the video, lays out the pieces. The tape deck is an SD card player “reminiscent of a VTR crossed with a modern XDCAM deck,” running on a Pi 3B+ under balenaOS with a small display, push buttons and a rotary encoder as the jog and shuttle wheel. Drop MP4 files in its folder at build time and they loop on startup. The included test file is named “2002-36 - Clip 064.mp4.”

The station clock and audio monitor is a Pi Pico 2 driving a six-digit LED display and a SparkFun “Noisy Cricket” amp, which the README notes “has been discontinued.” The waveform monitor and vectorscope runs on a Pi 4 with its composite TV output switched on. The transmitter is in there as 3D-printed faceplates. Then the whole rack goes on the road so he can watch a CRT in public.

The repo carries an MIT license and an honest caveat: “This repo is a work in progress; all files are not yet posted and progress will depend on interest.” The scope’s README opens with “More to come…” before its settings.

Play the video on YouTube

The video has a chapter on his Watchman and another on power, a question any portable CRT setup has to answer. The scope’s code and files are the part still marked “More to come,” and the people most likely to ask for them are anyone who ever sat in a room like the one he copied.