Breathing life back into a Minitel 1B with the Minimit

Regular readers will know that I have a lot of love for the French Minitel system and own a couple. In the past I've written about using a Minitel 1B as a terminal and replacing the EPROM in a Minitel 2 to run custom firmware. Today I'm going to blog about a project called Minimit.

The Minimit is a small, Minitel-shaped box that attaches to the Minitel's DIN port and brings the Minitel experience back to life. The box contains an ESP32 which talks to the DIN port outputting Minitel-compatible text and graphics. And the graphics and letters appear slowly just as they would have in the 1980s.

Minitel is such a fascinating topic and technology - Teletext, but more versatile. I'm so glad people are keeping it alive like this.