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.