Circuit Bending an 80's Video Editor - An Exploration in Open Hardware - Simon Lees (EO2024)

Presented by Simon Lees

With the current push for open hardware and right to repair laws its easy to forget how open hardware really used to be. Recently I was made all too aware of this when I chose to Circuit Bend a 80's era Video editor and without much effort was able to find complete schematics and component lists.

This is a stark contrast to modern hardware and even the modern circuit bending community where generally there is very little information available around how to repair or modify hardware

With all that as a preface I will spend much of this talk explaining my approach to circuit bending and how I was able to use the openness of the hardware to my advantage. As someone with a limited understanding of electronics, circuit bending is an exercise in educated guessing combined with a whole lot of hope and significant levels of surprise when you actually end up with something cool. The open hardware of the 1980's makes this whole process significantly more educated and maybe slightly less guessy. Having access to service manuals made it simple for someone with limited knowledge such as myself to take a crazy idea and actually somewhat pull it off.

Alongside talking about the project I've worked on i'll cover some other simple designs for people who'd like to get started along with highlighting some of the other people doing significant work in this field. Of course there will also be a fair share of glitchy video demo's.

https://2024.everythingopen.au/schedu...

From Everything Open 2024 - Gladstone, QLD, Australia

Everything Open is a conference focused on open technologies, including Linux, open source software, open hardware and open data, and the communities that surround them. The conference provides technical deep-dives as well as updates from industry leaders and experts on a wide array of topics from these areas.

Video licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Produced by Linux Australia: https://linux.org.au

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