25May Discount on a new Makerbot.
A number of you have expressed interest in buying your own makerbot. I was surfing around this morning and found one for sale on ebay with a buy it now price of $1000. Every once in awhile people buy one of these without understanding the amount of time it takes to put one together. Once they see the bags of parts and side panels they give up.
If you’re thinking about buying one of these a $300 discount might be just enough to push you over the edge. If you’re interested you can .
That’s a picture of my makerbot by the way. I changed out the front panel for something a little less red.
24May Zoom H1 shock mount adapter, Second Run.
Parts are in! More of the Zoom H1 shock mounts are now available. First come first serve guys. If you need shipping outside of the United States select “other countries”. This adds $2 to the cost in order to cover overseas shipping.
SOLD OUT
Juiced link DS214 mounts coming soon.
24May Android Cellphones could be your next field monitor.
I was catching up on my tech news this morning and had a chance to watch Google’s keynote on Gingerbread and HoneyComb. If you’re not sure what those two names mean, basically they represent the next round of operating system upgrades for mobile Android devices like the Motorola Xoom tablet and the HTC thunderbolt.
As I watched the keynote this morning I heard something that made me rewind and play it back again. Google will be introducing USB host control to the next generation of Android devices. That doesn’t sound like a huge statement until you think about something like the OKII USB Fallow focus.
The OKII usb fallow focus uses a USB host controller with a cheap Arduino open source chip to control your Canon camera. Add a host controller to your phone and with a little software you could control your camera just like the OKII’s fallow focus.
There is also a video stream coming through on that usb cable and many phones have a resolution of at least 800×480. New phones have 1ghz and dual core processors crammed into them which should be more then enough power to handle streaming video from a camera and give you control over operation at the same time.
I don’t have the programming skills to patch something like this together but I’m sure someone does. The Canon USB SDK is easy to get a hold of and the new android SDK is also easy to find. I hope someone with some Java programming experience gets to work on this. I would be more then happy to pay $20 for an app that turns my phone into a monitor slash camera controller.
22May More Zoom H1 shock mount spam.
Most of my week has been taken up with the Zoom H1
One of my goals on this project was to turn these into a cheap boom mic shock mount. If you place one of these at the front and back end of a Dzone2 Cold shoe bracket, you end up with a great boom mic shock mount adapter. If I can get enough of them made, maybe I could offer a 2 for $18 deal. Add that to the Cold shoe bracket ($10) and you end up with a $28 boom mic adapter.
I should have some more up on the site next week along with the Juicedlink DS214 adapters. Still waiting on parts, so I’ll keep you posted.
20May Haier HLT71 monitor battery adapter
I mentioned a few weeks back that I had ordered an adapter that might allow me to use my with the Haier HLT71 monitor. The adapter finally showed up and I had a chance to test it out. Basically this allows you to convert the output of this battery to the input of the Haier monitor.
I normally use these batteries for my Lilliput monitor, but it also seems to work with the Haier monitor as well. In testing I was able to get just under 6 hours of run time with this larger battery. The down side is that I had to Velcro the battery to the back of the monitor.
The Haier brand batteries seem to be hard to come by and the included battery only lasts about 2 hours. If you do manage to find a Haier brand battery, they run about $30. So if you don’t mind this larger battery, it could be a decent alternative. You can pick up the .
19May ART USB Dual Preamp camera mount adapter.
I had some time last night to build that 1/4 20 adapter for the ART USB dual preamp I ordered last week. As you will probably notice the 1/4 20 mount positions the unit upside down. That wasn’t my original plan, I actually wanted to drill and tap the case on both sides and just thread the hole so I could adapter it to a cold shoe.
The reason that idea didn’t work out is because the little bits of soldered wire actually stick out further on one side then the other inside the aluminum case. Even if I drill and tap holes on both sides the mounting stud might end up bumping into the circuit board and shorting something out.
Instead, I drilled 2 holes into the flat portion of the case and used 2 very small screws to attach a bracket to the back. That way I could attach something with deep enough threads to be usable. The center hole is actually the result of my first attempt to drill and tap the case. I went ahead and mounted my adapter over the top of the hole to cover it up.
I had planned on drilling and taping a small chunk of aluminum, but a part made from the makerbot seems to be a little more elegant. I was hoping to have a mount on both the top and the bottom of the Art USB Dual preamp but I’ll have to find something with a smaller head before I can make that work.
I also removed the rubber feet on both sides of the case. This cut the weight of the preamp in half. The form factor is still a little bit wide for an on camera solution, but I think this might work well attached to my CPM cubed cage. It ends up being about 1 inch wider and 3 inches shorter then my . With phantom power, XLR combo inputs and a headphone amplifier built in, this could be a silver bullet. I’m hoping to run this through a full set of audio tests this weekend to see if it lives up to my expectations. If it does I’ll probably end up selling a few of my passive XLR adapters. Then all I have to do is add an 1/8″ stereo to 1/4″ Y cable
If anyone thinks of a better solution for camera mounting this little guy let me know, but for now this seems to be the best solution I could think of.
18May Zoom H1 shock mount adapter, first run.
I received a few more of the parts I need to build those Zoom H1
Consider these a beta test and remember these are printed out in melted plastic so each one is a little different. The buy it now link will stay active until these 6 are sold. Please remember to include your shipping address. I have a few more parts on order before I can post those Juicedlink DS214 adapters.
SOLD OUT. More coming soon.
16May Juicedlink DS214 full Review.
I spent most of my Sunday testing and playing with the Juicedlink DS214, I ran a few test on my Canon 7d and on my Canon t2i with the Magic lantern firmware update. As a small audio amplifier and a device that disables AGC on the 7d it works great. The gain is very clean and the high low switch gives you a lot of range. The on board meters work well, the overall size is very compact, and the gain on the headphone output is good.
I don’t really have anything negative to say about the audio performance of the Juicedlink DS214. It does what it’s supposed to and it does it well. Most of my complaints actually have to do with the design. The included audio cable is about 4 inches to short for most applications, the volume knobs are so small and close together that I have trouble operating them, and the 1/4 20 mount is in a crappy location.
The audio input is a single stereo jack so if you want to brake out the left and right channels you have to use a stereo splitter or combine this with something like the Zoom H4n. The switches on the top of the unit are also almost flush, so you’ll need a fingernails or a pin to select the settings you need.
I don’t want to sound too negative because the Juicedlink Ds214 does a good job, and most of these problems are minor. You can buy a longer cable for about $3, a stereo splitter cable is about $2, and if you don’t chew on your fingernails, you shouldn’t have any problem adjusting the switches. I can even deal with the extra small control knobs if I pinch my fingers together just so.
The major problem is the 1/4 20 mount. I would think a device this small would be designed to be camera mounted. Instead you get a mounting whole that is positioned at the back of the unit which makes camera mounting a pain. I designed a part to correct this problem, but I would think Juicedlink might have something like this ready to roll out when they released the Ds214.
The other thing to remember is that any AGC disabling device has its limits. You can’t actually monitor the audio being recorded at the camera so if the audio being recorded at the camera peaks, you might not see it on the Juicedlink level meter. The problem is Canon’s fault not Juicedlink’s. If you don’t feel comfortable running Magic Lantern Firmware or own the Canon 7d, then the Juicedlink DS214 or Juicedlink DT454 are probably the best way to go. They aren’t prefect, but neither is filming with a DSLR camera. It seems like these days you have to take the good with the bad.
15May Juicedlink DS214 adapter and Zoom h1 shock mount.
Finished up the Black versions of both the Juicedlink DS214 adapter and the Zoom H1 shock mount adapter, both of which turned out great. I added a cold shoe mount on both the top and bottom of the Juicedlink adapter, and cleaned up the design on the shock mount to include tie wrap holes across the top.
I still have to find a good source for yellow rubber bands. Minimum order on yellow rubber bands seems to be 25 pounds and I’m not sure I need that many rubber bands laying around the house. So the first batch will probably have flesh colored rubber bands included.
Now that I’ve got these 2 designs out of my system I can get back to the list of other projects gathering beside my desk. Things on the docket for next week are, Juicedlink DS214 review, more on color correction, Art USB Dual Pre review (and mod), and those editing tests on that AMD server I put together a few weeks ago. Hopefully it will be a productive week.
14May Zoom h1 and Tascam DR-05 shock mount.
A few weeks back I mentioned that I was working on a design for a Zoom H1 shock mount. Now that I’ve got the 3d printer up and running I can test out my design. I must say it works very well. I added a cold shoe adapter to the bottom of the shock mount, a 1/4 20 mount through the bottom, and placed 4 small holes around the outside so that you can easily tie-wrap audio cables.
I also added another spot for a rubber-band (red one in the font), in case you want to stiffen up the shock mount a little more. I hadn’t really planed on using this with the Tascam DR-05, but it seems to work fine for that as well. Once I get done with a few more adjustments I’ll print one of these in black and see how it turns out.
I think this could also work great for a few of those cheaper field recorders
