veebch/boostbox

Some notes on a cli terminal, upcycling an old super 8 film viewer

Boostbox

Some notes on a command-line terminal, (reversibly) built into an old a super 8 film viewer.

Background

The Boostbox was originally a little project to turn an old Super 8 viewer into a YouTube viewing terminal. After a year or so of tweaking it, it turned into a capable terminal that does:

• terminal mutiplexing
• email
• encryption
• scheduling
• chat
• video/ image viewing
• audio

Overview Video

Click/tap the image below for a description.

Parts

• Raspberry Pi 4 or any single board computer running linux with HDMI out should work
• Hanimex E300 super 8 viewer
• AC to 5V DC power supply (to attach to power switch on Hanimex)
• 7inch 4:3 LED screen (like this CLAA070MA0ACW) (Dimensions 154 × 119,2 × 5,4)
• Step-up convertor to convert 5V to the 9V DC needed by the screen (we used an adjustable MT3608 DC-DC convertor)
• Optional, a speaker that can fit in the recess that used to hold the bulb (alternatively, you can connect to an external speaker using bluetooth)
• A BM40 keyboard by kprepublic. Layers set up using QMK to add mouse-emulation keys for those surprisingly rare moments that call for a mouse.

Assembly

The shell is mostly empty, other than a bulb, a transformer, a lens and a plastic screen. These are easily removed (make sure you keep them in case you ever want to convert it back to a super 8 viewer).

Assembly will be influenced by the parts that you decide to use. One thing you are likely to need to do is to file away some metal to get the screen to fit. This part is tedious, but with the right tools (we used a simple metal file), it makes for a zen (long, boring) hour of crafting.

Setup

Earlier iterations used Manjaro Linux (from the Raspberry Pi imager) but more recently vanilla RaspiOS was used and everything was done in a the framebuffer-enabled console.

The screen will be slightly obscured by the edges of the frame. This can be fixed by adding overscan values to /boot/config.txt.

For example:

overscan_left=40
overscan_right=10
overscan_top=40
overscan_bottom=16

UX / Tools

An evolving set of command line tools that make for an efficient workflow. Some things to make them a little easier to navigate are in the cheat-sheets directory.

In no particular order:

Terminal multiplexer

• tmux with configuration by @samoshkin.
• Start up elaborate sessions using a single tmuxinator command.

Email

• neomutt, a fast, flexible email client.

Encryption

• GNU Privacy Guard GPG.

Calendar

• Google calendar command line client gcalcli.

Chat

• IRC client, weechat.

Video and Audio

• ytfzf for searching YouTube videos.
• MPV for playing videos in the framebuffer.
• Multimedia content with ffmpeg

Image Viewer

• FIM image viewer program for framebuffer.