Custom builds
RASPBERRY PI | ARDUINO | ESP32 | PI PICO
It's 2012, and there I was, escaping the hot southern Spanish sun, taking a siesta. As you do these days, I reached for my phone and dipped my toes in the digital world. Suddenly, I found myself staring at an article about a computer going for a mere 20 euros. Intriguing, right? Thinking it must be some sort of tech-themed novelty item, I dived deeper into the details.
The more I read, the more it reeled me in. Then, I saw it - A photograph of a header full of pins that could only be a GPIO. Now, you must understand, my previous experiences with getting a physical input into a computer was a wild rollercoaster of expense and hackish ingenuity (anyone fancy wrecking another gamepad or parallel port?).
So, when I saw this oddly named creature - Raspberry Pi - I saw a world of potential. I instantly hit the metaphorical "BUY NOW" button.
After some time of eager anticipation (and let's be honest, obsessively checking the mail), my tiny fruit based tech treasure arrived. I plugged it in and found myself in a staring contest with a blinking cursor on a blank page. I had dabbled with a terminal environment before, but only lightly on a Windows machine. This, though, was an entirely different ballpark - this was a Pi with no desktop, where the terminal was king. But looking back, I'm grateful for that challenge; it was a crash course in Linux that paid off in spades.
Since that fateful day, I've been trying to find a balance with my Raspberry Pi obsession, both in terms of time and money. Spoiler alert: I've been failing spectacularly! But hey, who's keeping score?
PTZ Controller
The team at Audiohead has had the pleasure of collaborating with Libirel Communications on various camera installation projects. Two such ventures (one being Hockey Ireland and the other Lansdowne Rugby Club) sought to leverage these cameras for training analysis. A hurdle encountered was the challenge of effectively tracking the dynamic movement of play on the field.
But don't worry, we had a trick up our sleeve! In our tech toolbox, we assembled a Raspberry Pi and a touchscreen to solve the conundrum. With this nifty setup, we enabled preset recall on multiple cameras simultaneously.
Just imagine: you press the area of the screen where the action is happening, and voila! All your selected cameras swivel, zoom, and focus right onto that specific slice of the field. Talk about getting a front-row view, even from the control room! Now, keeping an eagle eye on every move during training is as simple as a tap on the screen.
Clockscreen
Our tech journey with Raspberry Pi began with a project we called the Clockscreen. Back in the day, it was just a simple Python script doing all the work. We also had an optocoupler interface on a veroboard, which, let's just say, was more of a 'prototype' than a final product. But hey, we all start somewhere.
Fast forward to now, and the Clockscreen has grown up! It's got its own web interface that lets you:
Tweak the clock GUI settings to your liking.
Stick your station's logo on the screen - because nothing says 'pro' like some solid branding.
Change the network settings whenever you need.
Set up SLIOs to connect easily with Wheatstone consoles.
Choose your preferred NTP server.
And here's the cool part: we've added a custom GPIO optocoupler interface board that can connect up to 3 tallies (like "Mic Live", "On Air", and "Phone") directly to the clock.
"But how does it keep time?" I hear you ask. The clock links up to an NTP server to stay accurate. You see, the Raspberry Pi doesn't have its own RTC (real time clock), so without this server link, the clock would drift off. Ideally, it uses a wired network connection, but we know that's not always possible. So, we included an option in the web GUI for setting up and connecting to WiFi. That's right - our Clockscreen can adapt to almost any situation!