 Hey everyone, welcome back to Retro Tech. Today I've got some pretty exciting news on some new products that are coming to life this year, 2024 Sony BVMs and PVMs. And so I'm just gonna jump right into it here. We're gonna talk about a post that was shared first off in professional broadcast monitors and it was Benito Loria who shared this. And so I wanted to give him credit. That was the first time. I had seen this updated version. Now, Bob from Retro RGB also did mention this last week in his weekly news podcast or a show. And this new update was actually pretty exciting. This is posted to Reddit by Mr. Scumlos. And we're gonna go ahead, I'm gonna show you this. This is a BKM129X cheap edition, okay? So this is the post that was up. This is the picture of the finalized product. And for the most part what this is, is this is a BKM129X video input card that is cloned and Mr. Scum, he goes by Scum on other forums. His name is Martin. He actually released all the plans for this on like GitHub and so we're gonna go through here. I'm gonna show you some of this stuff. But first off, I just wanted to show you this post. And then we'll go in here and down in the post there was some pretty good information. There's a, if you wanna build your own project, there is a GitHub link here from Scumlos BKM129X simple and then there's an Adruno code because you do our Arduino. I'm sorry, I don't know how to say that exactly right but it's this little device here, this blue universal programmable device here. You could get a program for it. So that's all been written here. Here's a link to that. And there's a lot more information at these two links which I've actually pulled up here in my tabs. I'm gonna show you them for a second. And one first thing was again, this is the guy who did this project. Thank you very much because this is a big lifesaver. We'll kinda go through that a little bit more as a why. But again, it is Martin and I'm sorry, I cannot pronounce your last name. Heinfeld, I wanna say. On Facebook, that's you can be reached. He wants some feedback. So if anybody gets one of these, I'm hoping to either make one eventually or if someone else starts making them, I will also probably buy one just to see. But the whole project goes like this. He's got a lot of information in here where the story is he had a couple of Sony PVM9L2s. So neither of them had, they both came with SDI cards and that's not an RGB card. He wanted an RGB card, but the thing is is the RGB card for this, they run pretty standard about $150 on eBay. That's all they, if you find one, they go for about $150. The bigger problem is the fact that these things have almost been completely swallowed up by the marketplace and there's not really a whole lot of them available. And it goes through long stretches where there won't be 129X is even available online. So this is a great alternative to that. And again, it's gonna look at the cost here in a second. But his problem was he had the 9L2s and no way to get a card into him. So this card, this 129X card adds RGB and component inputs to any L series monitor. It could be L2s, L4s, or L5s. And it could be any size L5, L4, or L2 that's available. And then it's also in the D series for BVMs. So it's one of the more necessary and desirable video cards that is available for the monitors because it's on such a wide range of high-end, multi-format monitors, which you definitely need a input source for RGB and component. So there's definitely a need here for this. And there's a lot of technical data. Martin is a lot smarter than I am. And he went through and thoroughly detailed this. I'm gonna link this information in the description below but kind of talked you through his process of reverse engineering this card, which was very impressive because there's actually some logic that goes on here where this chip on board here for the Sony proprietary card actually communicates back and forth with some of the equipment built into the monitor. So he was able to go through and reverse engineer that right up a program. And then he was able to get it to actually work. And there's, I guess, test runs from his first testing where he was able to get it to pull up in the option configuration as the BKM129X. So again, lots and lots and lots of technical information here. If you're interested, it's a pretty great story and a pretty great job at how he did that. And then there's another article here that he's made and written where it's just a little bit more detail on actually making the board. So here's a 3D rendering of the, I can't say that again, Kaikad of the BKM129X code. So there's what it looks like on the 3D printed, but actually the final version looked a little bit different where the parts were populated down here. And it looks like some of them may have been able to be cut out. But pretty simple stuff. If you're good at building surface mount circuit boards, then you'll pretty much have an easy time making this. And we'll try to do it probably or again, we'll buy somebodies and if they put it out before that, if somebody makes them. But here's a list of all the components. And so roughly, I made $25 for the completed cost here, which is again a crazy because that is goodness one sixth of the price of the original board. So that's a very good option for us to actually save money in this hobby, which isn't very often that somebody actually gets to save money. So again, more links. He also 3D printed a nice casing on the back of it. And there's another picture of that. So again, this is just awesome stuff. There's all the card and then some shots of it working pretty much on every component and RGB. So really cool stuff. I also did want to mention one more thing that I noticed when I was looking here at the comments for this right here is Scumlos pretty much donated this to the community. So thank you very much for doing that. And didn't ask any money for anything. And but I was looking down here in the comments, it looks like our friend Jam who made those really cool JVC cards. He says very cool Jam version coming soon. So that's pretty awesome to note that I think eventually there will be a version of this available for purchase. But I'll have more links to the, again, the complete detailed versions of this, but this is a really great thing for a number of reasons. Again, I've got an official 129X card here. And that design is it's not too far different than the actual design here of this card. It's just, it's being nice to have an option there where something like this was a limited production number. And there won't be any more of these made. And so that's really nice for that. But what it's really nice for is hopefully maybe this will open up the door to eventually the more extremely elusive video cards can be maybe remade or redesigned like the BKM68X for the A series BVM monitors. That's the rarest, but I do know that that one has a lot more logic going on in it. And again, there's wide speculation that Sony never made really more than 300 of those, maybe 500 at the most, but that card is very rare. But that's all. Again, guys, please give a big shout out to Scumlos, Scumlos, Scum, Martin, thank you. Again, we'll get these cards in, we'll run some tests on some retro tech episodes in the future because I feel like this is a great thing. And thank you guys for continuing to make new products for things like professional video monitors, even in 2020. So that's all I've got for you today. Again, check out the links for more information. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.