Your own 1982 cable community bulletin board channel.

Before feeds, your town had a channel: blue screens, chunky text, the time and temperature, the church bake sale, headlines crawling along the bottom. CABLE 82 recreates that channel and points it at your life. It turns any screen - ideally an old 4:3 CRT fed by a Raspberry Pi - into a scrolling rotation of the date and time, your community messages, fun facts, dad jokes, and live headlines from feeds you choose.

You make the channel yours in a control room at /config - or by editing one plain config.json file.

Read the build story on nothans.com, watch the one-minute video of it on the air, or leave the full six-minute demo playing.

Weather is one optional strip - current conditions, hi/lo, and sunrise/sunset - fed by Open-Meteo (free, no account). For a full retro weather channel, ws4kp does that beautifully.

The time	The weather	A dad joke

You need Node.js 18 or newer.

git clone <this repo>
cd cable-82
node server.js

Open http://localhost:1982 in a browser. You are on the air.

Then open the control room at http://localhost:1982/config: your name, your messages, your feeds, your colors, your page lineup. Hit Save and the channel picks it up within about twenty seconds, no reload. (Prefer a text editor? Everything lives in config.json; edit it directly and the channel still updates.)

1. Header band - channel name and the live time and date, always visible.
2. Pages - full-screen colored pages that hard-cut every 12 seconds: a big clock, your community messages, DID YOU KNOW facts, DAD JOKE groaners, a WEATHER card, and headlines.
3. The crawl - a continuous ticker of headlines along the bottom, fed by RSS.

The control room at /config is the friendly way in: one screen with the whole channel - identity, timing, feeds, the page rotation, community messages, the crawl, and colors. Every change is validated on the server, written to config.json, and picked up on air. The two ways in stay honest with each other: if config.json changes while a control room is open (a hand edit, or a save from another tab), the open screen warns you, and a stale Save is refused instead of overwriting the newer file.

config.json is the file underneath, and you can hand-edit it just as happily. The keys:

Colors are palette names: blue, cyan, green, yellow, red, magenta. The palette is broadcast-safe on purpose; raw hex works too if you must.

Feeds are fetched by the server, never by the browser, and only URLs listed in config.json can be fetched at all. If a feed goes down, the channel keeps running on the last good copy. If the network dies entirely, the clock, messages, and facts keep going forever.

On a Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS:

1. Get the picture onto the TV. Two ways in, depending on your Pi and your set:

   • Coax / antenna input (works on any Pi, and the reliable one): run HDMI from the Pi into an HDMI-to-coax RF modulator, then coax from the modulator into the TV's antenna terminal. Tune the TV to channel 3 or 4 to match the modulator. Any Raspberry Pi and any CRT with a coax input will do this.

   • Composite out (older Pi with the yellow AV jack, TV with RCA input): add to /boot/firmware/config.txt:

     enable_tvout=1
     sdtv_mode=0        # NTSC (use 2 for PAL)
     sdtv_aspect=1      # 4:3
     

2. Run the server on boot - /etc/systemd/system/cable82.service:

   [Unit]
   Description=CABLE 82
   After=network-online.target
   
   [Service]
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/node /home/pi/cable-82/server.js
   Restart=always
   User=pi
   
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target
   

   Then sudo systemctl enable --now cable82.

3. Chromium in kiosk mode (autostart or a systemd user unit):

   chromium-browser --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars \
     --disable-lcd-text \
     --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required \
     http://localhost:1982
   

   (--disable-lcd-text turns off subpixel font smoothing, which tints the chunky text pink on some displays. A CRT does not care, but it keeps flat screens honest too. --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required lets the background music start on boot without anyone clicking.)

4. Stop the screen from blanking: sudo raspi-config > Display Options > Screen Blanking > No.

If the TV crops the edges, raise the overscan margin in the control room (or overscanPercent in config.json) until nothing is cut off. There are no fake scanline filters in CABLE 82: the CRT is the filter.

The real channels were never silent, and neither is CABLE 82. Drop audio files into the music/ folder and the channel plays them as a continuous background bed behind the pages, looping the whole set (shuffle optional). Two tracks ship with the channel, a 1980s one and a 1990s one; the rest is up to you. Turn music on or off, shuffle, and set the volume in the control room.

Browsers block autoplay until a user gesture, so on a desktop the music starts on your first click; on the Pi kiosk the --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required flag above starts it from boot.

The crawl carries one extra item: the latest CheerLights color. CheerLights is a single global color that anyone in the world can set, and every connected light on the planet follows along. CABLE 82 checks it about once a minute (server-side, like every other fetch) and scrolls your message with the color name filled in: THE WORLD IS SET TO {COLOR} comes out as THE WORLD IS SET TO PURPLE.

Turn it off, or make the message yours, in the control room. Or, by editing the config.json:

"cheerlights": {
  "enabled": true,
  "template": "THE WORLD IS SET TO {COLOR}"
}

• Server: node --test test/server.test.mjs
• Client pure functions: start the server and open http://localhost:1982/test/harness.html
• Failure drill: node server.js --chaos serves mock feeds that randomly hang and fail, so you can watch the channel shrug it off
• Soak: open http://localhost:1982/?soak=1 for accelerated page flips and refreshes with stats logged to the console

• Typeface: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack by VileR (CC BY-SA 4.0), the IBM VGA 8x16 face. See fonts/LICENSE.txt.
• Weather data from Open-Meteo (free, no API key; CC BY 4.0).
• Spiritual ancestors: every local cable text channel that ever scrolled a bake sale, and ws4kp for proving retro TV nostalgia belongs on the web.

MIT for the code (see LICENSE). The bundled font remains CC BY-SA 4.0.