Happy Holidays!!

Hope everyone is taking some time off with the people/things you love! Heres a BTS with COX cable shooting stadium basketball, Pretty cool! check it out if you've got ten min. to spare.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Happy thanksgiving everyone, hope youre all binge eating by now...

I lieu of a picture of a turkey that I drew on top of an outline of my hand, (It was really good) I give you all this behind the scenes of a generic SKYTV Broadcast, one Europe's biggest 3D eng/sng companies.



If you've got six min to bask in all the stereoscopic live broadcast glory I'd highly recommend it.

Have a nice day!!

Houston League Finals

Houston League finals were about a week ago. The event ran smoothly and qualified 1412c The Road Hazards and 4128 Vulcan Robotics for worlds!

Roll 24 Productions was also there! and doing our thing. All went reasonably well on our end, running two cameras for the stream and archive, and PA and IMAG feeds for the house.

Thats two 13ft stands with axis cameras on top, PA cabs too.

HEEEEEEY Robot Remix

I know I'm running a little late on this one, but the first annual Houston Robot Remix was october 27th.

All in all I'd say that this event was a great success!

     The Actual competition ran very smoothly, and I'm pretty sure everyone that participated would agree that it was a lot of fun to end the season with one last big event close to home. The webcast also went super awesome!! Michael Fore has officially been added to the Roll 24 team, this was his first event producing and he did crazy well, most people don't handle being tossed to the sharks quite as well. We also used all six of our cameras, which is the most we've used at a robotics event so far. We were really trying to make a positive impression on the local FRC coordinators, and hopefully we did!

Click through the break for photos and match videos!

(Also, more Houston Vex this Friday and Saturday!!!)

Houston League

We had our first event of Houston Vex League today. Went fine, not great but fine. I took the SAT in the morning so I didn't make it to the Arena till around 1:45.

For those of you who don't know, the Houston League is a series of VEX Robotics competitions in Houston, Roll 24 Productions has been contracted to provide A/V support and web streaming.

I've also been working on fairly comprehensive post regarding the use of commercial IP cameras in a production environment which I promise to post soon, I know its been a while, this year has been kinda like a hurricane. The cherry on top for this little info session is our new piece of gear, I just won a sony HVR-HD1000 on eBay, which I plan to run into our Teradek Cube.

TRR Stream

 Hey everyone!
  Some of you may have known that I was in Austin Texas, streaming Texas Robot Roundup last weekend. It was another fun road trip with Paul, and it actually went incredibly well!

Click on to see how we did it!

Teaser!! Here's Paul's GTI stuffed full of webcast gear!

Iphone Audio Cable

Here's the quick and dirty iPhone audio interface that I whipped up today. It plugs into the headphones port on an iPhone or similar phone that uses a TRRS for mic and speaker, and sends the headphone out of the phone to a stereo channel on the mixer, and balances a line level output from the mixer and matches it to the mic level input of the iPhone. I will use this cable to take calls during live shows.

The trick is to making something like this work is getting audio back into the phone, its extremely simple just plug the left and right channels of the headphone output into the mixer, but convincing the powered microphone input to take a line level signal is a bit trickier. We'll make the conversion using two resistors, check out the diagram after the break.

Roll24:LIVE

We'll be running video for the Texas Robot Roundup in Austin in one week, and I've pulled out all the stops on this one, its now or never folks!

Things are a little hectic right now with the preparations, but I know we will be live all day Friday and Saturday, and hopefully I can bang  out a behind the scenes post soon after!

Wireless HD Video

I've been experimenting with a new toy recently, and I must say I'm very excited at the opportunities it opens up for my business. As you can probably guess from the title (and also the picture above of me streaming from a borrowed Panasonic Lumix to my MacBook) that what I have been experimenting with is a way to get HD from a floor camera back to my laptop wirelessly.

Enter the Teradek CUBE,

The cube 220 is a network video encoder, capable of generating a unicast video stream in many flavors (from 480i all the way through 1080p) and broadcasting it over wifi or ethernet. This is very cool tech, because it brings capabilities previously reserved for production companies with access to HD-SDI Transmitters costing tens of thousands of dollars and operating using large batteries and and large amounts of licensed bandwidth.

Today, small start-ups, such as our very own Roll 24 Productions, can broadcast full HD wirelessly from light weight, ENG cameras with only several thousand invested. Naturally its not that easy, it would be that easy if the tech would just stop changing for a darn minute, but I'll complain about that some other time.

At any rate, you've probably gathered  by now that I've gotten my hands on a Teradek Cube, and last week Nick and I took over a booth at the local Diner to try and get it up and running.

As you can see I'm very excited. This equipment represents  large leap forward for my business. All I can tell you right now is that this thing is tiny, light on weight and light on power. It also works, and now that I have it configured its simple to bump video from anything that has a HDMI output to my laptop. you can look forward to a full technical breakdown sometime in the future, once I get my hands on a camera other than Nick's Lumix to test with, and develop a battery solution that is held together with a woodworking clamp.

Arkansas

A week ago today I was in Bentonville Arkansas with the robotics team for the OMB off-season regional, it was a mixed bag, plenty of fun, very tiring, a little stress and a little suck. All and all an excellent road trip.

It was also the first gig that our fancy new camera snake saw any action on (here's Harry in the bleachers rocking our camera) and the guy performed like a champ! It wasn't the best production I've worked on, Blocked ports meant using uStream instead of WOWZA and volunteer camera men were somewhat shaky, but once we got rolling there was no stopping us, and we served 158 unique viewers.

 Paul Takes his turn with the camera

 And Angel holds down the "booth" full of laptops hosting the stream, commentary, and twitterfeed


We also had our fair share of trouble off the court, namely with a ATV we nicknamed "the squirter" because of its apparent distaste for engine coolant...

And of course! what road trip would be complete if someone didn't lock their keys in the car the morning we were set to leave?

But hey! Like I said, just the right balance for the perfect road trip. It was a blast and I can't wait to take the trip again (hopefully) next year!

Pneumatic Crimper

Here is the rough CAD of my pneumatic super tool, extremely rough, but it easily gets the concept across.  I've got many of the parts ordered and already on hand.

Next revision will need.
- Less metal, this one would be a little pricey in raw materials
- Adjustable height between bottom jaw and top jaw in open position
- A working CAD that is to scale and uses the proper parts
- A more compact frame (if possible)

 Here we see many of the power and control components, and I've received even more components in the mail since this was taken. I've also started on assembly of  the control box and decided that there is no room for the big red E-stop switch (Bummer, it wasn't really necessary, but it added a touch of professionalism.)

Blogging is hard. My thoughts never flow on the page quite the way they do in my head. The last couple weeks feel kinda like what I imagine being hit by six trains converging  in a star at the same time would. I'm hoping the summer will call down, its going to be difficult to keep this up.

Broadcast Camera Snake

And there we have it! the completed camera snake, ready for broadcast use. (well its not pretty yet, but once I have a shorter firewire cable it will be 100% done)

But I do have a finished 200ft cable that passes power and DV to and from between the camera and producers location. Overall I'm quite satisfied, and as long as the cable stands up to portable use I believe this will serve me quite well for run and gun broadcasts. The end goal of this project was for the cameraman to only have to drag one cable behind them and this has been accomplished to satisfaction.

Close up of the finished cable fan ends.

Machined aluminum mounting plate.

Mounted transceiver.

Powerizing a hand tool

I've started a new internship this week where I have had the pleasure of crimping hundreds and hundreds of 1/4" QCs. It really is a pleasure, no sarcasm there, but the hand crimpers are killing me, and giving me blisters.


So enter the magical world of pneumatics! below is the bimba pneumatic cylinder I will be using to modify my lame hand crimpers into awesome power crimpers!

So far my design consists of a tower to support the crimpers (or any hand tool with a lever type action) by one handle and pivoting "palm" that attaches to the other and is powered by the cylinder to drive the tool shut.
The cylinder will be actuated by a three way valve, triggered by a foot pedal.

The end product will be a powerful accessory which will power most hand tools for icreased speed and lower strain.

Custom Cables

I've been making my own Audio and Video cables for as long as I can remember needing them, and tend to hold myself to fairly high standards (in other words, I can make a mean cable if I do say so myself.) So this summer I plan to supplement my income by manufacturing some custom cables for sale on eBay and my website. Of course I'll offer the good 'ole friends and family discount, so if anyone out there is in need of any length XLR, 1/4", IEC, Power or other cables hit me up. I'll update you guys with ore details once I get in the swing of it.

The camera snake is coming together quite nicely as-well. The voltage drop over 200ft of cable, while still significant, doesn't phase the camera in the slightest (it claims 50% battery.) One thing that is becoming apparent is that even with cable as flexible and durable as mine, 200ft 1/2" thick cable is a monster to deal with, and difficult to roll/unroll without kinking. I'll have to figure some sort of management solution out.

Once I get my hands on a male 5pin XLR and nice RJ-45s with boots this project will be complete!

New Gear -- Behringer X2222USB

Disco Bots end of the season party was tonight at my place, and while I was setting up I found myself in need of a new board (the one I use for video, an old Radioshack, seems to have kicked the bucket) so I flew on over to Evans planning to pick up a smaller Behringer personal mixer.

As you can probably tell, that didn't happen. Evans was having a sale, and this model was priced fairly reasonably, I figured you can always mute channels but you cant (easily) add more, so I pulled the trigger. This particular model has 8 mono channels with preamps and four stereo channels, the real kicker however is the built in USB sound card routed to the tape in and out.

The USB feature will be so useful for me in both the environments I work in. Obviously having built in USB in a broadcast application is great because it means I can plug the mixer straight into the computer I'm broadcasting from without another interface, The mixer also has built in effects (including delay) which will make syncing audio to video a cinch. For live sound I get a direct channel to Adobe Audition to record, and I can play standby/background from my laptop with the touch of a button on the mixer (and without losing a channel on the board.) Behringer has always been one of the first to integrate features like this into their product lines. They make cheap, lower end gear, but to stay relevant in the market they pack it full of features like built in effects and compressors. A USB interface like this is a no brainer, all it is is a cheap USB sound card attached to tape in and tape out, but it still adds an awesome feature to an already great board.

So far it looks like behringer knocked this one out of the park.  I've had issues getting the software to install, but it is recognized fine by Adobe and Garage Band. Once I put this guy to use on a more serious gig I'll be able to comment further on performance but so far I'm super excited!

Camera Snake Progress

     Today I received the spool of cable I intend to use as the video and power snake for the webcast camera, it's 16/4 bundled with Cat5e. Only available from two manufacturers that I know of, so when I ordered it I didn't really know what to expect, but when I opened up the box I was very pleasantly surprised. 

     It was difficult enough to find any cable that suited my application (this one is designed for home automation use) so naturally when I finally found one I was excited, but there was still plenty to be weary for. This cable is meant for in wall installation, so even though its cheap and bears no fire ratings I was worried it would be far to stiff and prone to kinking. I also had to consider how a cable jacket meant to be run in wall would stand up to the stresses of use as a portable cable. While I can't speak to how the cable will stand up to long term portable use, I was very pleasantly surprised by the flexibility of the cable. The jacket and conductors are very flexible and soft, so much so that I'm not to sure I would want to run this in the walls of my home, but the cable seems very well suited to my application.

I also got some short firewire cables, this one is just wrapped around the transceiver, not yet custom cut to length and jacketed with the power cable, but this will work nicely for now.

Today was also the last day of classes! WooHoo Seniors!!

An old DV/ENG camera for live broadcasts?

yes.

That's an old JVC ENG shoulder camera, which I use for live webcasts, its well suited to this task because; it looks professional, is shoulder mount (steady shots,) puts outs out clean enough video over firewire, and can be had for cheap because its a little older.

But whats that sticking off the back where there should be battery you ask? 

Find out after the break!

Data Radio Modems

This is a Data Radio T-96SR radio modem, they're really pretty cool. Their original application was for data collection and monitoring in oil and gas fields, and I picked two up at my local EPO.

They support a TON of features, including addressable master/slave networking and the use of serial flow control for transparent half-duplex operation. They operate in the 900mhz band, which is a pretty serious band to mess around in without a license, but there are some bytes of the band allocated for amateur radio and low power license-free radio, so experimentation with these should be A-OK as long as we're careful. With a couple of watts at 900mhz and the right antenna, they should be able to hit a couple miles range.

I've built the serial from the diagram in the PDF manual, but haven't gotten it to communicate with the programing software yet. I keep getting errors, Once the summer spins up I look forward to getting these things talking to each other. I have no particular application for them per-se, but I sure do like messing around with radio gear.

Updates on these Data Radio modems will come!