Day 3

Video (and audio)

In the previous article, entitled Day 2, we talked about the keyboard as item #3.

So the Pi has 2 ways of outputing video (well, 3 if you include the DSI connector on the motherboard, but no practical of using it right now). An HDMI port:

And an RCA connector with a composite signal:

Today we are talking about hooking up your Pi with a plain old TV.

It is important to make a note that the default mode of operation of the RCA composite video out on the Raspberry Pi is NTSC which is mainly used in North America. This page link will take you to the details to change the mode to PAL or PAL as used in Brazil or NTSC as used in Japan. If your TV is autosensing, it might be irrelevant, but if not, simply change the mode in the /boot/config.txt file (sdtv_mode= 0, 1, 2 or 3).

If you look at the back of a TV, you will see one or more RCA connector. if there is only one it will propably be yellow and say video in. Some have multiple:

Still, we want to connect to video in. Since we also have audio in, as a bonus we connect the sound too (else we would need to plug headphones in the audio jack on the Raspberry Pi):

And these are the two cables and the adapter you will need to connect to the Pi:

And finally, how it connects to the Pi:

It works!

And finally, one more example of connection on the TV side (a smaller portable unit), the yellow is video and the black connector is audio, left and right channels.

All we need now is the Pi. As a FYI, MCM and Adafruit in the US seem to be shipping very quickly (a few days to receive).

So, why did I number these articles Day 0, Day 1 etc (starting at zero instead of one)? To get you used to a fundamental thing. Computers start counting at zero. If you try to do a bit of Python (maybe your motivation for buying a Pi), you will encounter all kinds of situations where you have to think in these terms (if you want to go a bit deeper on this, I suggest reading Dijkstra).