Before you start hooking up wires to your TV (where high voltages might be present), it is a good idea to first test things in a safe environment. However, if you’re skilled radio shack enthusiast, you can skip this section and proceed to the real deal.

You still need to disable the internal pull-up resistors in the Arduino IDE software before connecting to the TV, otherwise you risk damaging your set.

For the rest of us getting acquainted with the Arduino board and practicing some reading & writing to a test EEPROM would be a good start.

First, I’ll show you how to connect Arduino to the test EEPROM and do some byte reading and writing. Next, I will disable the internal pull-up resistors in Arduino, which is a necessary step needed for connecting the board to the Panasonic plasma. And last, how to restore reading and writing to our testbed by adding external pull-up resistors.

Next: Basic testbed