The notion of building a monitor/speaker AV tester came up in the forums a few weeks ago. Someone requested to see a project devoted to testing VGA displays and Speakers. The project I made many years ago: The VGA Test Box can be used to test displays, however it is large, clunky and not friendly for mobility concerns.
To answer these concerns, the challenge was put forward to fit a full fledged AV tester into a mint-tin can with minimal requirements for using it. With these ideas, requirements and desires all in mind I delved head first into the project to see how well things could come out.
For this project I want to build an Audio-Visual test box that I can plug into a standard VGA monitor and see a 800×600 display of colors (Red, Green & Blue) and the AV test box should also be able to send audio output to test speakers. Additionaly, the audio output from the AV test box should be a single tone with a knob to adjust the pitch of the tone higher and lower.
To be successful, this AV test box must work well on a variety of monitors (what good is a test box that doesn’t work?). Similarly, the audio output must work across a variety of different devices, whether they are speakers, a microphone input to a laptop or audio input into a 5.1 surround sound system.
For more detail: Mini AV Test Box
