Aaron Gayle’s TV-Top Kiosk firmware, written up on Open Electronics, turns a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W into an HDMI console for TV-Top Games, a tabletop platform where the television is the board and players use their phones. The kiosk joins a WiFi network, pairs with the TV-Top server and draws content the current game sends. Output is 1920×1080 at 30 Hz with 8-bit color per channel, without a framebuffer or external video hardware.

A 1080p frame at 24 bits is almost 6 MB and the RP2350 has 520 KB of RAM, so the frame can’t be held in memory. Instead, scanlines are built as a stream of run-length HSTX commands six lines ahead of the beam, from vector geometry cached in flash. The HSTX serializer is rated for 300 Mbit/s per pin and 1080p30 needs 744, so the chip runs at 372 MHz with the core regulator at 1.30 V.

The eight GPIOs match libdvi’s pico_sock_cfg pinout, so an HSTX DVI adapter, a Pico DVI Sock or hand-soldered wires all work.

See more at open-electronics.org and content on GitHub.