Something neat from over the weekend! My Multi-Functional TV Lantern isn't quite the same as most other folks seem to have in the videos and guides (<- this one is pretty nice) I could find about these odd 5.5" TVs- it looks like most of them were standalone portable TV/radio sets, and used a different PCB and main IC.
I was completely unable to find anything about the 'TM2915' chip used in mine, or anything further about the device itself. The Coleman version I mentioned in my last post still has a live product page on Amazon,1 funnily enough, but the 'Cobra' name given seems to correspond with a different 5.5" black and white TV lantern they sold around the same time period (there were at least three unique models), and the model number given in the description (841.582) doesn't show up anywhere else online.
Fortunately, it looked like the chip I had was pretty similar to the more common CD5151CP, so following the pinout in the guide I linked above I was able to inject a composite signal at the video output pin with a test lead. And it worked! The board layout here doesn't have that convenient solder blob right on the output (probably because it wasn't ever designed to include an input, while the others shared the same PCB as models which did), so I cut the trace from the pin to the adjacent resistor lead with a razor blade. I'll solder my input wire directly to the resistor, and if I ever want to re-connect the tuner for some reason I can just stick a jumper across the cut.
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Amazon also has gotten somehow even more reprehensible in their search engine practices... entering the query "coleman tv lantern" not only turned up nothing like what I searched for, the website also secretly autocorrected my query to 'rv' and gaslit me about it. On the original search page, the URL for the search and the query I entered in the search bar in the site header both show "tv," but when I click to the second page of results both the URL and the text left in the search bar change to "rv!" Not only is this obstructing my ability to find anything like what I'm looking for (not that I really expected that site to surface old/defunct listings without a direct link anyways...) but it is actively obfuscating that it ever did anything to alter my input. I know 'amazon is gross and bad' is not exactly hot knowledge but this is a new low for user experience tbh
