Bored to death. Sick of waiting for robot parts and WiFi modules. I decided to break something. So I started searching around for ways to display data from the Arduino to a monitor.
I found this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBXiZpuncg
And this instructable: http://www.instructables.com/id/TV-Out-with-Arduino/
I suggest you guys check it out and I will do my best to teach you here.
Here's a demo of how it worked out for me:
(Hope you don't mind my phone camera 
)
Let's get started!
Here's what you need:
- A Yellow Video Cable (I don't exactly know what they are called)
- An Arduino Uno R3
- 4 Jumper Wires (I used 3 jumpers and 1 breadboard wire. It doesn't matter)
- A 10kΩ resistor and a 560Ω resistor (A brown, black, orange one (10k) and a green, blue, brown one (560))
- (Optional, but recommended) a wall power source for your Arduino. It makes the thing a bit more mobile so you don't have to carry around a laptop
Step 1: Chop up some cables!
What I did here was take my lovely video cable and cut off one end. From there it exposes 2 wires and a little bit of white insulation. One wire will be insulated with yellow rubber and one is just stranded copper wire. From there I stripped both wires and then soldered some solid copper wires that I cut to the end to make it work better with my solderless-breadbaord.
Step 2: Breadboard set-up
Now we need to setup the breadboard. This circuit is courtesy of the youtube video I listed above. It works just fine. Basically put the stranded copper wire into the breadboard and wire it to ground. Then put the yellow wire into the breadboard and then have that run into the 10kΩ and the 560Ω resistor then take those two leads and wire them to pins 7 and 9 with the jumpers. Now I know that made absolutely no sense so here is a diagram in Fritzing and then I have a picture of my actual breadboard:
The gold wire being the copper stranded and the yellow being the well, yellow wire.
Step 3: Time for code!
Here comes the hard part. Or well, the super easy part. Kinda a bit of both.
Install the TVout library for Arduino here: https://code.google.com/p/arduino-tvout/downloads/detail?name=TVoutBeta1.zip&can=2&q=
Don't know how to install libraries on Arduino? Check it out here: http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Libraries
Now the TVout library comes with a few examples that I recommend you look at but if not, here is my example:
Just upload that baby to the Arduino and your ready for the next step.
(Here is all the commands for the entire library if you want to learn more: https://code.google.com/p/arduino-tvout/wiki/FunctionalDescription)
Your done!
Alright guys, we're all done. Time to try it out! All you have to do is supply power to the Arduino and then plug the yellow video cable into the yellow video jack on your TV. Set the TV's source to video and enjoy the action.
There is a lot you can do with this. I hope this helped some of you out and I'd love for you guys to show me your creations right here on element14. I'd also love some feedback on my tutorial as this is my first one. Have fun guys! Happy Hacking.
