The initial plan was to add more resource by fitting a Raspberry Pi 3A+ giving it a big performance increase but after desoldering some of the headers from the board and poking around I just couldn't fit it in the case. It might be possible with extreme measures like removing the camera header and soldering the ribbon cable directly to the board but this feels like it would be a failure anyway.I ended up doing the simple incremental change of fitting a camera and sticking with the Raspberry Pi Zero W and it can just about handle video calling with Ekiga.
As standard the Pi Zero camera comes with too short a cable for this to work at all and there's no way a full size Pi camera will fit in the space under the CRT. You can't buy Zero camera extension cables but you can convert them to a full size ribbon and back again so this is what I ended up doing. Three cables and two joints but it still works just fine. It's routed all the way round the left hand side of the case and emerges back on the right side. This is so it's possible to maintain the original slide on/off switch and volume control.The tuner wheel has been converted to a 'rocker' type switch with a couple of tactile switches, epoxy and luck. I also made a better job of the power switch, fitting an actual slide switch rather than a momentary one and relying on a long cruddy lever to push it. This all works much better than my first prototype and I may go back and rework it in this style. I'll need to buy more camera cables/joints though.
I'm still yet to do anything about audio. I dug out a little USB microphone dongle and may see if I can slim it down and hardwire it to a USB cable plugged into the port on the Zero. I'm not keen on desoldering the USB port, just in case.
For audio output I need to test the PWM output method and build a suitable filter.
Oh and then there's all the software I need to tweak, while Ekiga works there's no realistic way to control it so I'm dialling in from a laptop to test.
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