Now you can put color video output into your electronics projects easily and affordably.

The Video Critter is a subsection of another project which allows your microcontroller or other electronic projects to easily create a 128×120 pixel color video display signal. The Video Critter uses an ARM processor along with a handful of passive components to generate either an NTSC or PAL video signal.

The interesting thing about this particular gizmo, though, is that it’s an “open source project”. That means that you can get the full schematics, source code, and instructions completely free if you’d prefer to build your own and save a few bucks. So, you can build your own Video Critter, extract chunks for your own projects, or just learn how things are done on the ARM processor.

However, if you want to buy a pre-built, pre-tested Video Critter, you can get one for $75 from SparkFun. By the time you look at having a board made and then assembling everything yourself (surface mount components and all), the price is actually pretty attractive. Be sure to share any projects you build with one of these – I’d love to see a home-brew game console or some other fun project using the color video signal.