Inspired TV Heads

When I made my TV head, finding good guides and documentation for it was a challenge. Nowadays, I get messages from people around the world asking for TV head advice, and my writeup gets used as a tutorial for aspiring TV heads. Here's a gallery of TV heads by people who used my writeup to some extent and reached out to me!

Leo (@from_nothing_to_nowhere)

Leo was one of the first people to reach out to me about my TV head, in April 2021. They made the main body out of paper-mâché, along with those awesome horns and a clever hood-like bill that helps highlight the lights. Frankly, it looks sick as hell. See their writeup for more information.

Cookie (@CookieBitLive)

Gosh this one is cute. Obviously I love the colors! Here's more information from Cookie:

I learned a lot since this is the first time I’ve ever done any kind of arduino/electronics project before.

My matrix ended up being 15x18 pixels as that’s how many would fit. The program I wrote for it is super simple since I wrote it last minute, but eventually I’ll figure out how to make it display different patterns to take advantage of the entire screen.

The ears are 3D printed and they have Bluetooth pairable speakers inside! I also have a pair of old TV antennas that will eventually be attached to the sides to look like whiskers.

I'm especially impressed by those 3D-printed speaker ears. All around a great design!

Aurora Rose (@countryhijabicosplay)

This one looks so nice! I love the color scheme and decorations. Aurora Rose has something in common with me, Vivian Rose: we're both named after Rose Lalonde!

liirects (@liirects)

liirects first reached out to me in May 2022. They had made several TV heads before, but adding electronics was a new experience for them. They reached out again in March 2023 with a lovely finished project!

They used a Metro M4, controlling the display using a cute row of colorful buttons on the front. I admire that simplicity.

From liirects:

This is my third tv head project, but the first to feature LEDs on the screen. I was inspired by vivian's blog to experiment with LEDs, and with the help of two close irl friends, I finally succeeded in making it work.

DeVinci (@sudoDeVinci)

DeVinci used a Raspberry Pi Pico for this one! They wrote this nice clean writeup on GitHub along with their code. This is the first time I've seen an electronic TV head project documented as well as my own.

More pics on DeVinci's Twitter here and here.

What a cute boxy look! I love the shark. 🦈️ More info from DeVinci:

I always thought tvheads were cool but only ever really thought of building one when I decided to go to Närcon here in Sweden. I got help from a club I’m now a part of called Kodkollektivet that make some awesome projects. My friend Dave came up with the idea of the 3D printed LED front frame and light diffuser strips.

I love IOT related stuff but only ever worked with Micropython and ARMv6 asm, but there weren’t many good tvhead related resources besides yours, and even less using Micropython. So my goal was to make the head, make the process easy and straightforward, and document it so other people can use it.

My design is more focused on animations than scrolling text, so it’s all about smooth animation. Animations are put into folders as a bunch of frames, then the frames are processed into csvs and loaded onto the board. The board plays the animations, but only the change between each frame is rendered since it’s all pre-processed.

I also made a little testing platform today so I can work out kinks for the next iteration. The knobs are for brightness, animation speed and animation selection. The handsome guy’s name is Hubert.

Here's another head by DiVinci, based on Stray! You know, that game where you're a cat and everyone else is robots or something. I've never played it. Also a cute mini prototype for Hubert.

That's all for now! I feel so proud to have helped these people make such great projects. If you make a TV head using mine as a guide, I'd love to hear about it!