We have seen before that the trend towards retro is reaching unsuspected levels in terms of extreme auctions, but far from that maelstrom of meaningless prices and fancy collectors, there are users who truly love their consoles, and are willing to do what they want. whatever it is to continue using them no matter what.
Hang all your Nintendo consoles on the wall and control them with Alexa
Odelot is a user who wanted to share his latest homemade work with the world. Tired of not being able to connect all his retro consoles due to space problems, he decided to make his own wall anchoring system with which he could place all the consoles with the cables perfectly collected.
Thus, he would avoid having to place them all on the table (space that he did not have available for so many consoles) and could display them without problems like the true collector that he is. The problem came when he wanted to turn on the console he was going to play on, a problem that he decided to solve in the most practical way today: with an intelligent assistant.
The idea is that it could control the video signal of all the consoles without having to change the cable, and without touching any other device. That is, everything with the voice. After designing the wall brackets and creating it with the help of a 3D printer, the next step was to control the ignition of the consoles.
The older models of retro consoles had two-position physical switches, so, always leaving the on position, we will only have to connect and disconnect the socket to turn the console on and off. This is something we could easily do with an Alexa-compatible smart plug, but instead of having so many plugs per console, Odelot decided to create its own switch board with this feature.
Controlling the video signal
The other step to control was the video signal, and it was the most complicated. With the help of a video switcher, the creator of this setup was able to control all the video sources to be able to show whatever he wanted on the TV, however, his idea was to be able to control everything with his voice, so he developed a development board with software he wrote so he could send the necessary commands to the RS-232 port of his Extron MVX-84 VGA Switch.
Obviously all the consoles needed to send the signal in RGB, so he also took charge of designing the necessary boards that would take the video to the switch correctly. With everything set up, all you have to do is ask Alexa which console to show on the screen and it will take care of turning it on and selecting the necessary video channel for the TV to show the image of the chosen console.
The process is quite laborious, and life may have been complicated in some steps, but in general the work could give new ideas to other collectors who are in a similar situation.
On the project website you can find all the files of the Alexa skill (designed to work with the Extron switch), the 3D plans of the wall base for the consoles and all the details of the project. The question we ask ourselves is, how will he plan to change the game?