Building The Peca Tv-Out Cable


bagmouse7

Member
Joined
Oct 25, 2004
Messages
299
Last week I ordered the full set of parts from Peca in order to build the Pandora TV-out cable.
The parts list includes, the ext connector, the "tiny-bob" that connects to it, the ext/bob connector cover, a small 3x8 blank circuit board, 10meters of the 7 line shielded cable, a tiny black project box, and a full suit of s-video and RCA connectors.
You will need a high quality soldering iron with a very fine point, some very thin solder and an ohmmeter.
I used this page's EXT pinout - http://pandorapress.net/2010/01/13/pandoras-ext-port-pinout/

I asked Peca for some building tips and he sent me over a list, here are his tips.

some tips:
- take care about pins layout!
- I usually solder TinyBoB to EXT connector first and check by ohmmeter.
- then strip cables, solder RCAs and S-Video and check by ohmmeter.
- then solder cable to TinyBoB check by ohmmeter and glue cover to EXT port connector.
- next I solder cables to small universal PCB (included in package) and again measure by ohmmeter.
- cut holes into little plastic box, bond cables by plastic tie strip
- I'm using hot-glue-gun for gluing.


Here are My comments:
I ended up finding a 6 foot, high quality shield s-video+2 RCA audio cable laying around so I cut one end of it off and used it instead of building my own.

First, I soldered the cut ends of the molded cable to the small 8x3 PC board that Peca sent.

I used the following pinouts:
1 - Right audio
2 - Ground
3 - Left Audio
4 - blank
5 - blank
6 - C - Color (Chrominance)
7 - Ground
8 - Y - Intensity (Luminance)

Then I soldered the TinyBoB to the EXT connector. This is delicate work, triple check all connections with your ohmmeter.

Next I took a 6 foot section of the 7 line shielded cable that I got from Peca and connected it to the TinyBoB and the 8x3 PC board (remember to slip the EXT connector cover over the cable before you start).
Now you can triple check the cable end to end with your ohmmeter.

One thing I found out (the hard way) was that most of the s-video pinouts (like this one http://pinouts.ws/s-video-pinout.html ) don't specify if you are looking at the male or female side, so it is easy to mix up the "C" and the "Y" video cables.
If these are swapped, you will see a very faint black and white video image which looks out of sync. When everything is working correctly, hot glue the connector and tiny black box.

When the cable is finished, go to the Pandoras settings menu and enable the TV-output.
On my home TV (42 inch LCD) the picture is fantastic. Super clean image, and setting the TV to "full screen" image mode makes the Pandora's image fill the screen in the correct aspect radio.
The audio output if also nice and clear.
This project turned out better than expected.

Thanks Peca for the parts and the tips!
 
Quick update.
Caine has written a super nice TV-out configuration app for the Hotfix 6 Beta.
It works great.

News can be found here:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/5592-tv-out-configurator/
 
Back
Top