May 2026
There's a touchscreen mounted in my kitchen — I call it the WallScreen. It runs recipes, the chore board, a calendar, the usual smart-home clutter. One day I decided it should also pull in free over-the-air television. No subscription, no streaming app, just the local broadcast towers that have been beaming HD into the air for free this whole time. I had a Raspberry Pi 5, a $30 USB tuner, and what I assumed would be a boring afternoon.
It was not a boring afternoon.
The tuner that didn't want to work
The tuner I grabbed was a MyGica A681 — a tidy little USB TV stick. Plug it into Windows, install the bundled software, done. Plug it into a Raspberry Pi running a current Linux kernel and you get… nothing. The computer notices a device is there and otherwise shrugs.
