Build Story
1. What TBX Is
A television station. Not a media server. Not a Plex clone. A broadcast station with numbered channels, a schedule, a signal, and the feeling of something that exists in the physical world.
TBX Home Broadcast runs on a Raspberry Pi 5. It boots straight to playback. A FastAPI backend talks to an mpv playback engine through a Unix socket. A broadcast seek algorithm calculates in real time — every time someone tunes to a channel — exactly where in the schedule the current moment falls. Tune to Channel 4 at 8pm on a Tuesday and you join mid-episode, like a real network.
Built alone, in a studio apartment, over the better part of two years.
2. The UI and the Remote
The web UI is React. Dark, amber, gunmetal — the color palette of analog broadcast equipment. You surf channels with a handheld IR remote. You never touch a terminal. You never see Linux.
The 7-segment display on the front panel shows the channel number. The power LED breathes slowly when the station is idle. The activity LED flashes amber during imports.
3. Channel 99
Channel 99 is a hidden game console. Six original games: a roguelike mining game, a 3D space explorer, a fever-dream walking simulator, a competitive Tetris clone, a rail shooter, a procedural driving game. All six share a universe, a mythology, and a lore document longer than most fantasy appendices.
4. The Software
360 files. 320 passing tests. 17 phases complete.
Cloud tier, Stripe integration, OTA updates, 48 setup wizards, 30 CLI commands, SD card image build pipeline. A Kickstarter plan, manufacturing plan, QC checklist, legal pack, and a launch-day playbook.
The code is done. The image builds. The tests pass.
5. Phase 18 — Building the Hardware
On the desk: an ATtiny85 in an 8-pin DIP package. A P-channel MOSFET the size of a grain of rice. An LP2950 LDO, a VS1838B IR receiver, a TM1637 display, two 3mm LEDs, a 2N2222 transistor, a 1N4007 flyback diode, resistors, capacitors. A breadboard. A soldering iron. A multimeter.
The ATtiny85 is the power controller. It sits between the wall and the Pi. It watches for a button press, holds the MOSFET gate, reads a heartbeat GPIO line, and manages a state machine — OFF, STARTING, RUNNING, SHUTTING DOWN — in 8KB of flash. It can be woken by IR remote. When the Pi is ready to die, the ATtiny waits, then cuts the power cleanly.
This circuit doesn't exist yet. Building it now.
6. What Comes After
When Phase 18 is done — when the multimeter readings match the schematic, when the LEDs do what they should, when the Pi boots and halts and boots again on command — Phase 19 begins.
Phase 19: TBX image on a real SD card in a real Pi in a real enclosure. The whole system running for the first time as a complete product. Then the hero video. Then the launch.
Your station. Your signal. Your broadcast.
