USB knob box doubles as a Blackmagic Designs camera remote | Hacker News Reader

USB knob box doubles as a Blackmagic Designs camera remote

bikerglen.com

99 pointszdw40 comments

I love these sorts of little projects. I don't know else who is likely to use something like this other than a really serious podcaster or vlogger, but clearly the writer has a need for it. It's also a great reminder of the versatility of the cheap microcontrollers we are able to use these days. It's pretty straightforward to use one to make just about any kind of input device you might want, and with wireless microcontrollers like the ESP32, you can even give it wifi! I use a variety of ESPs around the house with ESPhome for home assistant, doing all sorts of things. It's pretty easy to get into (home use level, not production electronics) embedded just by reading some datasheets and writing a little code these days.

If you ever shop for professional video devices, you'll know exactly why people are DIY'ing this kind of stuff. When you're on set on a "real" shoot, every mistake is expensive, so the gear is priced to reflect how "solid" it is. For those on a lower budget but want the same look/features, the microcontroller world has been a gawd send. I've built so many little motion controllers, lens controllers, ultrasonic digital tape, etc types of things that I'd never purchase the "legit" models. I tried building an auto-focus for manual cinema lens with the ultrasonic sensor telling range, a motor on the focus ring, and a whole lot of patience. I would never ever bring that onto a real set, but it was an interesting couple of weekends worth of learning.

I’ve built something very similar. It uses an Arduino Pro Micro and the HID library. It uses a large knob as a scroll wheel. Now I’m so used to it that scrolling without my extra off-hand device feels awkward and slow. Easily my most useful project

A writeup would probably be well-received here

The Blackmagic Micro Studio Camera from the article makes a really great little machine vision camera. Compared to _anything_ available from a traditional machine vision vendor that will take controllable lenses, it's way cheaper and smaller. All of the equivalents generally take EF-mount lenses, while the BMD micro cameras take fairly cheap Micro 4/3rds lenses. SDI, while requiring slightly special hardware on the computer end, offers great bandwidth and extremely long cable lengths if you use fairly cheap fiber adapters and is vastly more reliable than USB cameras.

Only real complaint I have is that there's no feedback on lens configuration (zoom position, aperture, focus position, etc) in the SDI output. It could totally be encoded in the VANC data of the output video frames (the same way commands are sent via SDI to the camera).

I was thinking, looking through the post, that it'd be interesting to try to train a learner on the parameters of the camera control system. When you say "machine vision camera", are you talking about an industrial application, robotics, or something else?

I use them for robotics work, but they'd be usable for industrial tasks as well. Significant outdoor use requires enclosures, but that's true for any of the cameras that aren't already IP67 rated (and not a lot of those have controllable lenses).

>I have a Blackmagic Designs Micro Studio Camera I wanted to use as a webcam for video conferences. Even with a 16mm sensor, it has better quality than any small sensor webcam

I would certainly hope that with interchangeable lenses and a ~$1.2k pricetag that it would beat out basically any webcam.

Speaking of lenses, the one shown seems wrong for use as a webcam. Wouldn’t a prime lens with a short focal length be what you’d want?

Its a cool project but it makes me wonder what the use of the zoom and adjustment to focus is in the end. If you’re sitting in front of your computer at approximately the same distance, there won’t be a need to adjust anything.

I’m seeing a 12mm-35mm. That’s pretty damn short at 12mm. And wider, and you’re close to fisheye. That could be fun for Zoom calls especially if you rock back and forth the whole time to play with that distortion.

The viewing angle with a 12mm focal length on a blackmagic s16 sensor is probably closer to a 24mm lens, maybe even more, on a full frame sensor.

This was a a nice read, really detailed. I especially liked that he had the MCU talk directly to the camera with S.BUS (a weird uart with 2 stop bits for the control interface) despite the issues he encountered, instead of going the slightly easier but less elegant route of having a separate computer in the loop to do the HID <> S.Bus translation.

I've had good luck with cheap midi mixers for a-bunch-of-usb-connected-rotary-encoded-knobs like the Behringer X-Touch Mini https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0B3M - works on pretty much any kernel with audio modules.

Using what software to make it useful?

https://twitter.com/ultrahax/status/1200902654882242562?s=20...

It's some python on a GL-AR750S-Ext https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GBXMBQF/ so I can turn a knob and manipulate latency, jitter, packet loss etc. to traffic going through it. You can read knob state ( and write back LED state ) straight from /proc

Reminds me of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial_box

90's era Silcon Graphics workstations came with them, they were great.

Before that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller)

I can't believe OSH Park is still going after all these years.

They've expanded to laser cutting and stencils too, which are awesome. Purple PCBs forever!

Biker Glen could fairly trivially get a job at Blackmagic if he's doing this kind of thing for fun. Should send them a CV, and a hyperlink.

I absolutely love BMD for putting these features/capabilities into their cameras just knowing that people will do things precisely like this. They are the company that I feel like positively disrupted their industry without breaking laws and what not like others have done.

BMD has made production-grade video equipment affordable to the masses. They're kind of the Behringer of the video world, with the difference obviously being that BMD doesn't knock off designs from others and uses high quality components.

Only gripe I have with BMD is that you need a separate piece of utility software for each and every component and it's not entirely obvious if there are firmware updates for a specific device available.

I like them too but my gripe is they claim BRAW is an "open and license-free standard" when (as far as I can tell) it's undocumented, supported only via closed binary blobs and distributed under a very non-free license.

I actually worked on some of the obfuscation for the SDK back when I worked there. :)

The goal wasn't to promote software freedom but to ensure that anyone could simply download the DLLs and use it in their software without needing to sign an NDA, beg for permission or deal with patent bullshit.

The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this (primarily through stuff like camera calibration data, but also the maths in n the background) that they don't want ripped off by competitors.

As I understand it BRAW was developed to avoid RED's patents, which I heartily approve of but I don't think they should advertise it as "open and license free" when it isn't.

Like I said, I do like BM's stuff. I was a Free Software puritan for a long time but when I started doing video stuff Resolve was just too tempting.

Some technical decisions were made to avoid RED's patents, but I don't think that's the main reason BMD wanted to make their own codec.

From the outside it seemed like they removed CinemaDNG due to patent threats from RED, and added BRAW to replace it. But that might be joining the dots and making five.

I suspect it was more of a case that CinemaDNG is just a pain to copy/move from one storage media to another; thousands of small-ish files are much slower and more cumbersome than a single large file.

I don't believe CinemaDNG is affected by Red patents because it's basically just a folder of numerically sequenced '.dng' still images and DNG is an Adobe standard. You see other companies using it.

Note: I am not a lawyer and Red may well have tried to sue somehow, but the basics of CinemaDNG compression go back to JPEG T-81 from the 1990's.

Wikipedia says "The adoption of CinemaDNG among camera manufacturers appears to be hindered by Red Digital Camera’s patent US9245314"[0]. Also there'd be no reason to remove CinemaDNG from their cameras otherwise? Plus I'm fairly sure Grant Petty alluded to patent issues when he announced they were removing CinemaDNG and adding BRAW.

I'm not intimate with the patent but from what I understand you're right, CinemaDNG is just a sequence of stills in a tarball. In which case it seems nuts that the patent office granted and upheld a patent covering that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaDNG

I am responding to Joeboy.

The state of FOSS NLE's is laughable. OpenShot is a mess.

Does it need to be FOSS if it is just free? Resolve has filled that niche for many many people. Very few of them care that they can’t modify the code.

What contributions to FOSS NLEs are you working on?

> The reality is that there is millions of dollars of R&D in the source code for this

This doesn't check out. The Linux kernel has billions of dollars in R&D, and where is the obfuscation?

On the topic of obfuscation, would you recommend a specific product or solution?

Yeah, and that they just give you DaVinci kinda stuns me. It wasn't that long ago that entire agencies existed as a business just to in effect rent productions access to that for color correction.

I was at one of those shops. When the Mac version came out, the colorists were pretty pissed as they were comparing the price of all of the other gear they had already paid for compared to free. Granted, back then the Mac was a toy in processing power. Then the GPU expansions became available, and the non-Linux versions became real. Still held onto the Linux versions as long as possible to continue using the existing panels that used 50ohm coax cables (token ring??) until they finally released updated versions of those. At $30k, people were choking, but still at least $170k cheaper.

This will be the lasting legacy of BMD. Still shake my head and laugh knowing the quality for the price of then and now. I’m crying but from laughing while noobs are crying because it’s not free. From my experience it damn well is!

Yeah, as a teenager I volunteered with a non profit that did some animation and video production. A sony camera and a couple D1 decks to edit on were their crown jewels. Most of what we used was SVHS for cost reasons.

Now, for as little as $10k you can put together a setup that will get footage that rivals the best funded productions in the world.

right now people are flying blackmagic pocket 4k, 6k and 6k pro camera on $4000-5000 high speed octocopter UAS for cinematic FPV type video which cannot be acquired any other way, and in places too small/tight/risky (or low budget) for a helicopter.

where the need for high quality footage exceeds what you can get out of a gopro hero 10 but you're not going to get into the hundreds-of-thousands cost range.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=shendrone...

the same platform is popular with blackmagics of various types, and the red komodo

Very neat! unfortunate it doesn't use LANC, i would have built one for my BMPCC original.

cost of the sony controller $1000

cost of the diy project taking into account hours spent $50,000

Learning all the things and making it yourself: priceless.

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