Geochron to liven up the dead wall space of a flat screen TV

Loyal readers (both of you?) may remember how upset I have been that the U.S. has filled up with flat-screen TVs and most of them sit dark and ugly most of the time. One dream that I’ve had for a long time is turning them into digital photo frames when not in use, but the crummy software on these TVs has so far made that impossible (I have yet to find a TV that can be programmed to turn itself on at 8:00 am every day, show slides, and turn itself off at 10 pm (functioning as a TV, of course, at some point in the middle if someone wants to watch something)).

Enter the Geochron Atlas 4K. For $450, it paints a flat-screen TV to look like the 1970s Masters of the Universe dream mechanical Geochron (still available for about $3,000). This is a great Christmas gift for the brother/sister/binary resister who has everything. The 4K Geochron (which I verified does work on our old Panasonic 1080p plasma TV). has a bunch of data overlays, e.g., weather and satellite tracks, that you would never be able to get on a mechanical Geochron.

The Atlas 4K is about the size of a stack of 5 iPhones (imagine the delight!). It has an RJ45 jack on one side for wired Internet and an HDMI male plug on the other for the image output. Power is via USB.

The remote control seems to be RF-based (at least I was able to control it through a closet door and around a corner). It would be a lot nicer if one could connect to this from a smartphone on the same WiFi network, but there is no app or provision for this. Configuration via the remote control is the most tedious part and the little remote can always be lost, run out of battery power, etc.

The company seems to be keeping up with current American obsessions. For example, the July 21, 2020 software (automatically downloaded via WiFi; see changelog) will optionally show a COVID-19 plague status overlay. (We should ask for a virtue layer, in which countries with maximum mask compliance and shutdown are highlighted in green while Sweden and South Dakota are bright red for heresy.)

Our kids went nuts for this and asked a lot of questions, so we’ve already gotten $400+ in value out of it. (It is actually $399 through December 17 with “HOL2020” according to a marketing email that I recently received.)

The world is a detailed place. If this is mounted somewhere that people can walk up to it, might we have found a great use case for an 8K tv (now only about $2,400 for 65″)?

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24 thoughts on “Geochron to liven up the dead wall space of a flat screen TV

  1. A Chromecast is a pretty good way to do the digital picture frame thing. I use a combination of Google’s photo channels and photos of mine on Flickr.

    • But is your TV easily programmable to turn itself on at a fixed time every day and set its input to the HDMI connector to which the Chromecast is attached?

  2. This seems like something that should cost $70, and have free downloadable packages you could install on either Windows or Linux running on your own SBC.

    • David: If everyone wanted one then something similar would presumably be an option for the Chromecast, but it isn’t!

      I am glad to pay a somewhat higher price and have the company dedicate more programmers to adding layers.

      Look at all of the “free” stuff that we got from Google that they ended up killing (Picasa, Google Plus), thus causing individuals to waste days or weeks of time migrating data, updating links, etc. Contrast to Adobe where they charge for their services, but continue to support customers.

      I guess in the long run it might make sense for this to become a subscription service that paints a screen via one’s Chromecast or similar. It is the software and design that has value, not the hardware. I’m not sure why the Geochron 4K box is better than the latest “Chromecast with Google TV” (can output 4K). I don’t know if a Chromecast can be directed to do any thinking or if it can only decode a video stream.

    • I’m with him. Isn’t this basically a nice screen saver (although one that’s not likely to perform the mostly outdated function of screen-saving) And raspberry pi or mobile phone levels of hardware. (Although I guess you could say the same of a sonos)

  3. That’s pretty cool and $399 doesn’t seem like too much to spend on it (although David K. think its’ 5-6 times too much, I have a relative who spent a lot more on one of the original Geochrons) for a relatively niche product I don’t equate that with theft. It’s a pretty good value. It would be nicer if it was also integrated with Google Earth so you could touch the screen (on panels that allow it) and bring up a GE view of the locale.

  4. Is it FAA certified? How can someone be so averse to programming to pay $450 for a raspberry pi running a python script? Not getting a PhD in EE was a good idea.

    Having said that, a TV is sort of a good way to always have a static weather map. Maybe the government will inflate housing prices so fast, large TV’s will replace windows.

    • lion2: Minimum wage here in Maskachusetts is $15/hour. A “living wage” that would enable a family of four to rise above the welfare eligibility threshold ($100,000 for health insurance subsidies, $130,000 for housing subsidies) would be $50-65/hour. At a “living wage” of $50/hour, even if you already had a Raspberry Pi that could output 4K, you’d have to finish your work on this project in less than 9 hours to come out ahead. How many hours of coding and graphic design (in Adobe Illustrator? Just figuring out how to do the basics in Illustrator would take more than 9 hours!) do you think it would take to replicate the basic Geochron display? Then how many more to go out and grab the data layers and display them?

    • @Philg: It would take a lot more than 9 hours for a total Adobe Illustrator neophyte. People at the NYU Tisch School of Art spend thousands to learn Photoshop and Illustrator, in time scales of a semester or more. This is a pretty good course for $19.99 but unless you’re already fairly skilled, even this wouldn’t prepare you to replicate the Geochron.

      https://www.udemy.com/course/illustrator-cc-masterclass/

      They’re not stealing with this product. And frankly, when we race ourselves to the bottom producing incredible stuff for nothing, eventually everyone starves.

    • What are you saying? There’s no conspiracy? What conspiracy are you a part of to claim there’s no conspiracy? The anticonspiratorial conspirators? I suspected as much. Lol.

    • @LinePilot:

      And there are several splinter groups among the anticonspiratorial conspirators: There are the Russian Conspiratorial Anticonspirators, who spend their time trying to debunk any conspiracies except their own preferred ones. There are also the Anarchist Anticonspirators, who disbelieve in conspiracies as a matter of ideological impossibility, but who form a loose but devoted de-facto conspiracy to oppose the Anarchist Conspirators, who are completely illogical but believe that Anarchy needs a conspiracy in order to overcome all other ideological conspiracies. Those two fight each other over the bong, mostly. The RCA is, by far, the best funded.

      I, for one, believe the Earth is flat in certain parts of Montana. Especially if you have to walk across it.

  5. I have a LG TV that has a clock menu that lets you set an on and off time using any of the inputs. The only issue was that it would turn itself off after 2 hours if there were no interactions. This could be disabled from the maintenance menu (takes a special version of the remote with an extra button to get to it in some models for $8 from Amazon) . They have had this feature for a long time.

  6. Most new TVs are smart TVs, meaning that they run third-party apps written for WebOS, Android TV, Roku, Samsung, etc. It ought to be fairly easy to write an app to meet your needs. The TV maker would also have to allow it into their app store.

  7. “Loyal readers (both of you?)” This is wrong. I am your most loyal reader and I know Alex, LinePilot, Suzanne Goode, Pavel (aka the menace from the North), Anon, Mememe, averros, anonymous, etc are probably almost as loyal. By my estimation you probably have a dozen loyal readers and about 30 “semi loyal” readers so please spare us the self depreciation! You are loved by at least dozens! Now to avoid banishment under the strict comment moderation policy my thoughts on the Geochron….. When I worked in a windowless office I had a mechanical Geochron and was fascinated by it. Even though a 1 dollar app could replace it I found it very neat because it was fully mechanical. 400 dollars for the “4k” version seems pretty silly. Many free programs on the internet will do something similar for free. My favorite program at the moment is windy! If you are looking for something to hang up on the walls why not print some of your nice pictures or buy some art?

    • Toucan Sam: I have no problem with framed pictures, but if there is a TV on the wall and it is not being watched, it becomes a massive dead space.

      I agree with you regarding windy.com, but it doesn’t show the time in different parts of the world. How are you going to do international business if you don’t know what time it is in the manufacturing centers of China, Korea, Taiwan, and Germany? Can you dominate your fellow traders if you don’t know when the Tokyo Stock Exchange opens?

      Also…. how do you actually get windy.com up on your TV? Turn on the smart TV, activate the browser program, navigate to windy.com using the keypad on the remote? Do that every day?

  8. Wow, you put a dozen loyal tech-head readers together in a room and they all try to think of ways to put each other out of business! What a world we live in. 😉

    Addendum: my experiences seeing the mechanical Geochron in action have been primarily in an upscale dentist’s office and a white-shoe law firm in Chicago. So let’s hope Patrick Bolan (who bought the company in 2017 and moved it from the Bay area to Oregon) knows his core market and gets some glossy brochures out to customers in the core demographics as soon as possible, before the whiz kids here replicate it for Earl Scheib prices.

    From the Wikipedia entry: “President Ronald Reagan presented a Geochron to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985[2] as an “example of American ingenuity.”…

    Gorbachev is still alive and lives at least part of the time in the United States and Germany, where he has a luxurious villa in the Bavarian Alps. He likes real estate and presumably has a lot of nice rooms where a Geochron would look terrific.

    https://www.quora.com/Where-does-Gorbachev-live-1

    “So . Mr. Gorbachev is a US citizen and as an ordinary Russian, he has a “small” private house in the US … he also has his own Gorbachev foundation. The Russians believe that the fund serves to violate the laws and deceive the tax service.

    In Germany, Mr. Gorbachev owns a luxurious villa in the Bavarian Alps. This is a three-storey spacious building, built about a hundred years ago. The land area is 26 acres. The house has 17 rooms, and the living area of ​​the villa is about 600 square meters. The cost of the mansion is at least 7 million euros. And in England, he bought a billionaire mansion from Bahrain. Mikhail Sergeevich owns or uses two villas abroad. One is in San Francisco, the other is in Spain (next to the villa of the Russian singer Leontyev). He also has real estate in Russia – a summer cottage in the Moscow region (“Moscow River 5”) with a plot of 68 hectares.”

    Reagan, of course, is long dead, so the irony must be delicious for Gorby, who in 2006 “…expressed his continued belief in Lenin’s ideas: “I trusted him then and I still do”.[518] He claimed that “the essence of Lenin” was a desire to develop “the living creative activity of the masses”.[518] Taubman believed that Gorbachev identified with Lenin on a psychological level.[524]”

    Maybe he’ll move to the U.S. full-time now and buy a half dozen Geochrons!

    The hour has certainly arrived for the rest of us. Reagan is out, out, out, and Lenin is back in grand style, right here in the USSA. It’s amazing what 35 years can do.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Gorbachev

  9. > Loyal readers (both of you?)

    Don’t sell yourself short. I would say there are a good dozen of us.

    • @ScarletNumber:

      We might be the Dirty Dozen. God help us all. 🙂

      “Train them. Excite them. Arm them. And turn them loose on the Nazi High Command.”

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