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Episode 4: What's the Matter?

What’s the Matter?
By Paul Cutler (@prcutler) |

Welcome

Welcome to The Bootloader, a bi-weekly podcast bringing you news, project updates, and product talk from the tech and maker scenes. Paul and Tod will bring you three interesting things and chat about them for a few minutes each.

Full transcript available here.

View on Zencastr

Show Notes

Episode Intro

Welcome!

macOS Ventura cannot copy UF2 files (Paul #1) 00:21

  • Adafruit Blog post
  • Raspberry Pi Blog
  • You cannot drag and drop UF2 and HEX files using macOS Finder - it results in an error
  • Lady Ada gave a good overview of the technical issues in Ask an Engineer
  • Two workarounds
    • Use the terminal: cp -X blink.uf2 /Volumes/RPI-RP2/
    • Install a macOS short created by Alasdair Allen (author of the Rasperry Pi blog post above)
      • Shortcut
      • Works great! Update Shortcuts settings to allow shell scripts and just right click a UF2 image to transfer it
  • Help out and file a bug report with Apple!

Matter officially supported in iOS 16.1 (Tod #1) 2:37

3D printing for good causes (Paul #2) 7:00

  • 3D Printing for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Campaign
    • The idea was started by a teacher, Abby Brown, at Torrey Pines High School.
    • Each year the school has Yellow Ribbon week where students are learn about crisis resources and risk factors for suicide.
    • The keychains were designed to give away to her students as a special way to end Yellow Ribbon Week.
    • Each keychain contains a word, such as “Smile”, “Inspire”, “Create”, with about 10 different words.
    • There’s a fundraising campaign where you can print one of the designs found on Cults3D and post it on Twitter and Instagram.
    • Different organizations are matching the funds, with an opportunity to raise over $4000 by just printing and sharing!
      • Joel Telling, Printed Solid, LDO Motors, and Alien3D
  • [https://www.ic3dprinters.com/2022-toys/](3D Printed Toys for Tots campaign)
    • Organized by IC3D in 2018, they work with volunteers in the 3D printing community to print toys for kids
      • Over 69,000 toys printed in 2021!
      • This year they have over 140 volunteers and have printed 27,000 toys so far.
      • You can donate financially or sign up to help print toys
      • Toys include an articulated alligator, a train engine, cars, low poly dinosaurs, and more.
    • The signup period is now over to volunteer for printing, but keep an eye out for this next year.
    • Twitch.tv Stream

Hypno “video synthesizer” from Sleepy Circuits (Tod #2) 10:00

  • Have you ever taken a camcorder and point it at the TV to get weird video feedback?
  • Have you ever enjoyed those trippy algorithmic screen savers?
  • You can do both in real-time with devices called “video synthesizers”
  • I was at Synthplex last weekend and it was fun!
    • It’s mostly a audio synth convention but there were a few non-audio things there too, like:
  • Hypno by Sleepy Circuits is one such device
  • Physically it’s a small box with knobs, sliders, and buttons. And an HDMI port! (and NDI over USB for streaming)
  • Twiddle the knobs & sliders to create generative video patterns
  • Source material can be video “oscillators”, camera feeds, video files
  • Raspberry Pi 3 or 4-based, with Eurorack-compatible jacks to sync to your music
  • Been in development since 2019
  • Extensive documentation and a big community, with an active forum
  • (Product page](https://sleepycircuits.com/hypno)
  • Example videos on Instagram

IO Rodeo Launches the Open Colorimeter, a CircuitPython Analysis Tool for Citizen Science - Hackster.io (Paul #3) 13:10

  • Hackster.io article from Gareth Halfacree
  • The Open Colorimeter is an instrument with many applications, including measuring contaminants & pollutants in soil & water
    • Based on the Adafruit PyBadge
    • 3D printed case
    • Published under open licenses
      • MIT for the firmware
      • Physical designs under a CC-4.0 license
    • Excellent documentation with product guides and project tutorials
    • Example: measure the blue dye in sports drinks
  • IO Rodeo’s mission is to increase accessibility to scientific data collection tools by creating low-cost, open hardware instrumentation.
  • Open Hardware and Software: GitHub Repository

ffmpeg.guide makes configuring FFMPEG easy (Tod #3) 15:40

  • https://ffmpeg.guide
  • FFMPEG is tool used behind-the-scenes by many video processors including MPlayer, Handbrake, VLC
  • And used by many websites that handle A/V
  • At it’s simplist, it converts video formats (AVI to MP4) but it can do so much more
  • I use it to:
    • Down-convert HDR video to SDR, resample to 720p (for players that don’t support HDR)
    • Quickly cropping videos in a bit when shooting with a wide-angle lens
    • Recompress 4K video to 1080p with reduced bitrate usable by Twitter/Youtube
    • Convert audio of any format to .WAV
  • Example FFMEG commands
  • FFMPEG can do much more and it’s famously complicated to use
  • It’s been around for over 20 years! wow!
  • “ffmpeg.guide” is a “Flows & nodes”-based GUI for generating FFMPEG commandline commands
  • Free for up to 5 nodes
  • Developer post announcing it

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