Here is a bunch of things that I've done recently that I thought I would write down in case I ever need to do them again. It may or may not be useful for anyone else.
TEAC EU2816STF SCART Inputs
This TV comes with a dodgy manual that doesn't really explain much about the two SCART inputs at the rear that you can use to pump signals in. From a bit of experimentation I have managed to figure out the following.
External 1
The External 1 connector is on the bottom. It appears to be wired as for a standard SCART connection. If you put in a composite video signal it is displayed when the TV is in `EXT 1' mode. It's supposed to display an RGB signal when in `RGB' mode. I haven't tried that, as I don't have an RGB cable yet.
The TV has an option to set what appears on the output of the External 1 connector. This can be set to the TV, External 1 (ie. input pins copied to output pins on the SCART connector, or F-AV, which copies the input on the front AV jacks. This will only output composite video of course.
This input does not support S-Video, in fact this TV doesn't seem to accept S-Video signals at all. You can't expect too much from a cheap TV anyway.
External 2
The External 2 connector is where it starts getting weird. This is the connector that supports component video. Component video isn't officially supported over SCART connectors, so as far as I can tell TEAC made up their own connection and helpfully supplied a cable for use with it. Why it's a SCART connection I have no idea, it would have made a lot more sense to provide 5 RCA sockets at the rear. I guess they were going for cheap, but they had to supply a cable to take advantage of this, so it probably cost the same, if not more, to do it this way. Who knows?
You need to put the TV into YCbCr mode to use this input.
The cable supplied has a SCART connector at one end, and 5 RCA plugs at the other end. These are for Y, Cb, Cr video signals and L and R audio signals. The signal lines (tip of the RCA connector) are wired as for the standard SCART configuration, but the grounds are all messed up.
The supplied cable is shit, I see quite bad ringing (white/black lines at hard edges in the picture) when using it. This is most likely cause by not using cable that has a 75 ohm impedance. I'm going to make up a new cable when I get a chance and hopefully it will be a lot better.
The pinout is as follows:
| Signal | SCART Pin |
| Y (Green) | 11 |
| Y Ground | 17 |
| Cb (Blue) | 7 |
| Cb Ground | 13 |
| Cr (Red) | 15 |
| Cr Ground | 21 (shell) |
| L (White) | 6 |
| L Ground | 9 |
| R (Red) | 2 |
| R Ground | 5 |
Flashing Orinoco Silver 802.11b PCMCIA Card to 128 Bit WEP
Well I started trying to set up my old wireless LAN cards with my new ADSL modem/router/wireless access point and couldn't get 128 bit WEP to work. After a while I pulled the card out and saw that it only does 64 bit WEP according to the sticker on the back.
I remembered that a long time ago I flashed these cards to update the firmware to get ad-hoc mode to work correctly and after a bit of Googling found that there was similar trick to upgrade the cards to use 128 bit WEP.
Most of the useful information was gathered from the Netstumbler forums which contains a massive thread on this subject which took forever to read through.
I started off trying to get this to run on my laptop which runs Windows 98 but that was a lost cause and after a couple of wasted hours I switched over to my desktop running Win2k and it worked almost instantly. I highly recommend you use Win2k or XP if you attempt this (apparently XP has the drivers built in).
This is what I did:
- Install drivers from Agere. These drivers support pretty much any card using this chipset. Apparently you don't need to do this if you are running Windows XP.
- Flash the card using the Agere WSU firmware updater. Note: This is no longer available on the Agere web site.
- Download and run Alchemy. This changes a couple of values in the PDA (Product Data Area?) to make the firmware updater think that it supports 128 bit WEP. It can also update all sorts of other things like the MAC address, serial number, enable extra channels etc.
- Flash the card again using the Agere WSU firmware updater. This will load firmware and the card will report itself as supporting 128 bit WEP.
- Fire up the client utility and look for the bit that says 128 bit WEP enabled! Apparently the new drivers support WPA encryption as well. I haven't got around to trying that yet.
If you ever want to update the firmware again, you'll need to run Alchemy just before to make sure 128 bit WEP is enabled.
Leadtek Winfast TV2000/XP Deluxe Remote Control With Kernel 2.6
I had just upgraded to Linux Kernel 2.6 and decided to get the remote that had been sitting unused for a year or so working. It turns out that it would have been much easier back when I was running 2.4. However, 2.6 is so much better (my PC is still usable when burning CDs or compiling a kernel) that I didn't want to go back.
The old (2.4) way of getting this remote to work is to use the lirc_gpio driver and run Lirc.
The new (2.6) way is to use the ir-kbd-gpio driver that is built into the kernel. This driver lets you use the remote as another keyboard. There is also a method to get it working with Lirc (CVS, 0.7.0pre series). Much of this is taken from the v4l2 Driver FAQ.
What to do:
- Get a kernel with the following modules:
- bttv (for the TV capture card)
- ir-kbd-gpio (for the remote control)
- evdev (to have events from the remote show up on /dev/input/eventX)
- Insmod (or modprobe) the above modules
- Have a look in /proc/bus/input/devices and find the eventX device that the remote is on. Look for "Name: bttv IR" then under "Handlers:"
- Get a Lirc 0.7.0 prerelease and compile, install, etc. Make sure to enable the devinput driver (./configure --with-driver=devinput).
- Grab the Linux input layer lircd.conf and install it as /etc/lircd.conf.
- Start lircd with '/usr/sbin/lircd -H dev/input -d /dev/input/eventn'.
I managed to make some (very) dodgy Debian packages of the lirc 0.7.0pre7 to make the install on my PC a bit neater, but I'm not going to put them here. I don't want to be causing hassles for the maintainer.