Arduino composite video out using only 3 resistors

It’s supposed to be easy – 2 or 3 resistors and you can get your Arduino micro controller to produce low-resolution black and white composite video. Well, it wasn’t for me. It took me hours to get it working, but I finally cracked it. It’s possible I was unlucky, stupid or possibly both – but I’m writing it up before I forget how I did it and in case someone else has the same problem.

I tried about 4 different projects on different web sites which all broadly worked the same way: you connect a couple of resistors to some pins on the Arduino, wire them up to a phono plug, install the TV Out library in the Arduino IDE, compile and flash the code and off you go.

I could not get any of the sample code to compile in the current version of the Arduino IDE. I lost track of the different error messages I got. I’d make progress then something else would break. Googling error messages kept telling me to install the TV Out libraries – which I had.

Spookily I’d decided to try an old version of the Arduino IDE at the same time that @gadgetoid on Twitter made the same suggestion. In the end I compiled and uploaded working code using version 1.0.1 of the Arduino IDE on an old Lenovo Ideapad running MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I could not get any demo code to compile using the current version of the Arduino IDE, nor could I install an old version of the IDE on my MacBook because they required older versions of Java. Thank goodness for the old hackintosh!

I used:

• An old Arduino UNO (perhaps its age was part of the problem)
• a phono / RCA plug
• some jumper wires
• a small breadboard
• A 470 ohm resistor
• A 1K ohm resistor
• A 75 ohm resistor
• An old laptop to program the Arduino
• an old CRT TV with a composite video input (most modern LCD TVs have such inputs – or you can use a SCART adaptor)

Here’s how I wired it up. (In the photo there are 4 resistors not 3 because I lacked a certain value and wired two together in series).

(I am grateful to microcontrollerelectronics.com for hosting the Fritzing diagram of their project – the only difference here is that I had to move the green video wire to pin 7 (not 8) as I am using an Arduino UNO not a Leonardo as they did.)

The version of the TV Out library that I think I used finally (there were so many) was TVOutBeta1.zip – unpacked the zip file and put the 3 folders pollserial, TVout and TVoutfonts in the Arduino/Libraries folder like this:

This is the code that finally worked – I’m afraid I can’t remember where I copied it from now, I had so many snippets of code on the go. If it’s yours I will of course credit and link (or remove it).

Here it is working on a modern LCD TV rather than the retro CRT model at the top of the page:

Now I wonder if I can remember why I wanted to get this working in the first place..?

#include <TVout.h>
#include <fontALL.h>

TVout TV;
unsigned char x,y;

void setup()  {
  x=0;
  y=0;
  TV.begin(PAL);	//for devices with only 1k sram(m168) use TV.begin(_NTSC,128,56)
  TV.select_font(font6x8);
}

void loop() {
  TV.clear_screen();
  x=0;
  y=0;
  for (char i = 32; i < 127; i++) {     TV.print_char(x*6,y*8,i);     x++;     if (x >= TV.char_line()) {
      y++;
      x=0;
    }
  }
  TV.delay(1000);
  TV.clear_screen();
  TV.println("Fill the Screen\nPixel by Pixel");
  TV.delay(1000);
  TV.clear_screen();
  for(x=0;x