Building My Own "Stream Deck" [Stream-Pi & Macro Deck]

I currently have two Raspberry Pi zero W's just sitting around and I've been wanting to find a good use for them I also have been interested in buying an Elgato stream deck to help speed up some of my workflows so when eloqua reached out to me about checking out their 10 inch portable touch display I got an idea today I'm going to attempt to turn this Raspberry Pi zero and elecro's touchscreen into a DIY stream deck of sorts using an open source software called stream pie now before getting into the setup let's take a minute to talk about this display it's a 10.1 inch 1280x800 IPS panel with Five Points of capacitive touch the build quality is lacking a bit in my opinion with not all of these acrylic panels and the bezels lining up cleanly and there were also little bits of plastic still stuck in the screw holes in a few spots nothing too terrible though and it does feel very firm and has a good weight to it it has sort of a makerish Vibe with the acrylic panels and RGB that I actually kind of like but that's probably a bit subjective and yes it does have RGB which it whatever it's kind of cool if you like that sort of thing but I was pretty happy to just leave it off for the most part on the back there are three ports an HDMI input a micro USB for power and a micro USB for touch data although I learned that while using it the data Port can actually power the panel meaning for the most part you only need two cables to run the display even with touch on the top there is a button to control the backlight which isn't crazy bright but plenty bright for working indoors and I found that I personally like running it at around 50 to 60 brightness here in my office there is also an RGB toggle button as well as a rocker switch to select the RGB mode and brightness the display looks nice and sharp but colors definitely seem to be a bit off and there aren't any ways to make adjustments I don't think this is really meant to be a color accurate display though so overall it looks pretty solid the touch functionality was incredibly simple and just worked with everything I tested it out with with no need for any setup and it was very responsive and accurate I don't have a USB amp meter or multimeter but I was able to measure from the wall and with the RGB and backlight at Max it drew around 10 watts but less than half that at around like 4 Watts with the backlight at 50 and no RGB like I said I don't have any way to test the actual current draw but it actually ran fine powered from a pi zero USB output as long as the RGB wasn't cranked up all the way however one really annoying thing is that the RGB turns on by default every time the screen gets power cycled which for someone like me is pretty annoying also the sturdy monitor stand leaves a lot to be desired as the legs just fall off and they don't have any sort of rubber non-slip coating on the feet or anything overall though it's solid simple and works well if you're just needing a portable monitor with responsive touch which for this project is perfect when I was first planning this project out I had the thought to try and power everything using this Poe adapter and then a 5 volt butt converter and sort of just stick everything to the back of the screen to hide it all but I was smart and tested it all out first before trying to put all that together first I started getting the Raspberry Pi set up so I plugged in a Micro SD card and started flashing raspberry pios I made sure here to set up SSH to make it easy to install the streampi client software using the command line while the SD card was being flashed I went ahead and downloaded the stream Pi server software that will run on my desktop by then the SD card was flashed so I popped it into the pi zero which I had already wired up to my network as well as to my capture card and the display and after waiting a few minutes I used SSH to remote in and copy this script to install Steam Pi onto my Raspberry Pi and after a few more minutes I have the icon available on the desktop streampy does have a console version of the client software but that isn't supported on the older arm architecture that the pi zero is built on so I double clicked on the icon and the software very slowly opened and slow is unfortunately a trend for the next little bit of this video eventually The Client app opened but it was difficult to tell because the UI is incredibly small and I hope that this is something that a other people aren't dealing with as much and I don't think that's the case because I've seen a few Forum posts and B something that will get revised eventually especially since it's probably common for this stream pi to run on smaller screens like this anyway after making sure the server app was running and then typing in the server IP and port on the client side it crashed so I reopened it but then it wasn't connected but that just turns out to be a setting that needs to be enabled to automatically connect on Startup after turning that on I also enabled the setting to launch stream Pi whenever the pi boots after this I hit save and then exit instead of close which quit the software so that's a weird UI thing honestly exit and close like which one does which I don't know a little frustrating anyway so I had to reopen the software which took a few more minutes then I made sure the settings were good hit save and make sure to hit close as to not close the software and at this point I was able to see the client in the server software and set up my first button for this I just made it a simple text block macro and gave it an icon and it worked it took me a minute to figure out how to add more blocks but I eventually managed to do that and then I added a second action that would open up hardwarehaven.mit and it crashed again so after waiting a few more minutes for the client software to open again I was able to set up a button to open hardwarehaven.media Haven store where you can support the channel and buy some merch I also set up the OBS plugin to be able to control OBS using websockets and I was able to hop between scenes just fine honestly once the pie was running it was fairly smooth and there wasn't that much delay between a button press and the macro actually firing but even if it only crashed every now and then it literally took about five to six minutes for the pie to boot and then open the stream Pi software and it's unfortunate because I think streampi is a really cool open source project but it would be nice if it ran better on lower end Raspberry Pi's but that's not the end I wasn't done I still wanted to have a nice dream deck alternative so I started looking around for options and came across macro deck which requires an Android device for the client now I don't use Android for my phone or tablet but I remembered that I have this vim1s from katus Caddis not how do you say it exactly probably need to find out that I'll be checking out in a future video but the vim1s boots into a thing called wow which lets you pull various OS images and install them to the onboard emmc storage so I downloaded and installed the latest version of Android available and then installed the macro deck APK I also installed the server on my PC and for the sake of time just imported a profile I had messed around with during testing and after connecting the client to the server it worked super well so far I just have some macros to open some commonly used websites and folders and also got OBS working with it I even have a folder that I plan to add some Premiere Pro macros and hotkeys to but the cool thing is you can do a long press on it and just open premiere okay so I've actually been using this for quite a bit of time now that I'm actually editing this video so I thought it would be worth kind of talking about how I'm using it and and such so yeah this is very raw um but that's how it is on this channel sometimes you might notice the RGB lights are on and that's because I kind of gave up on turning them off because they just turn on every time this this little system turns on so it's really hard to see it's actually hidden pretty well but the vim1s is back here um I'm probably going to if I wasn't going to be making the video at this really soon I'm probably going to go ahead and just um like double-sided tape it to the back of this but for now it's just sitting down there and it has the buttons available so I can reset it if I need to I'm probably also going to add some rubber feet or something to these legs because they do kind of slide around usually the touch is sensitive enough that it's not that big of a deal uh yeah I figured I'd kind of talk a little bit about how I'm using it so first of all I have a bunch of just folders for a lot of the filters I use for editing and such and managing footage I have a bunch of YouTube links for a lot of the things I go to pretty often as well as um links for websites I use really often including I have two different email mailboxes so I have one for each I have some um stuff for presets here and my office that I can change um I can turn the lights off I have my room light on so it's not as noticeable right now so that's that all pretty simple this one's pretty cool I can hit this and it opens up parsec but automatically oh hold on okay I'm gonna do this again because uh there's some confidential stuff but I can hit this and parsec opens and automatically connects to my mini editing PC so I don't have to open parsec and then click it so it's super easy to get to oh I did it again I'm gonna have to just put some blur there yeah super easy to open up that one and do some editing or um I use it for encoding Blu-rays right now I've been been doing a lot of that down here I have a little home assistant folder but I don't have anything in it besides the few cues that are on this main page um I do have some OBS stuff but I haven't really been using a ton of OBS um sleep um I messed around with putting my computer to sleep which one button press it goes into hibernate not sleep I got to figure out a better way to do it but it's fine uh this is for testing it's doing nothing this just closes whatever application I'm in that's also not useful I'm gonna get rid of it but it's there the cool thing though is Premiere I have this super awesome thing that has sped up a lot of things like I have some little audio transition buttons some marker custom things um some scale presets um I can toggle guides on and off reset my layout and Premiere this is a really annoying annoying thing about premiere for example I'm sorry you can skip ahead I have I have chapters if this is boring you can skip ahead but for example in Premiere if I wanted to do a text overlay right here this would be a really bad example but if I did want to say hey you can't see that let me get to it for anywhere you can yeah so surprisingly that actually used the right font I guess because I had another project open but normally this would be like a white font and there wouldn't be a background on there and so if I want to change the color I have to click fill and then type in the color for the hardware Haven like Amber or whatever it is so it's that that's super annoying there's not really a good way to have like presets or anything at least not that I'm aware of so instead of having to type that in every time because I use this pretty often I can just click fill and then I just tap this and [Music] yeah it just automatically does it it's pretty cool same thing with the background color if I want to change the background color to the gray I use it'll fill that in so that's pretty nice there's also this opacity ramp one this is pretty cool um let's say I want this to fade in slowly I now I could do a dissolve here and that works on certain things but other things like if I do an adjustment layer like this darken and blur adjustment layer I have uh let me scale that a frame there we go it's pretty cool huh if I want that darkened blur to happen that little the blurry layer between the text and the video if I try to just put a dissolve there it actually cuts to Black first and that's not really cool so what I could do instead is I can go here click the clip hit opacity ramp and what it does is it creates a couple of keyframes wherever my my cursor was or the playhead was it creates that and sets it to 100 and then goes to the beginning of the clip sets it to zero and so now I have this nice smooth a little opacity ramps pretty cool so this is actually sped up my workflow quite a bit um how I'm actually setting these up is in macro deck some of these let me go to Premiere some of these are using hotkeys in autohotkey so if Adobe Premiere is open it'll input all of this stuff um some of them though did I say autohotkey I may have said autohotkey really not just now it's it's I'm tired in macro deck it automatically will do this but for some of them I've actually started experimenting with auto hotkey I still have a lot to figure out so for example this opacity ramp it actually just fires a single shortcut but that's handled in an auto hotkey script that I have that I'm still working on a lot of this stuff I'll have to kind of get it all figured out but yeah um I'm excited to see how this evolves but so far this thing's actually super cool um macro deck is pretty awesome I love to try out stream high as well if I could figure out a good way to get it running on the 1s I actually tried I don't know if I mentioned on the video I did try running stream high on get getting it running on here um and I struggled to get that to work so I just kind of I kind of gave up and what was the whole macro deck thing so pretty great I'm really enjoying it and back to the much more better produced video bye I ended up not attaching everything to the back of the display like I talked about earlier but it's still pretty clean with only a single power cord running to the vim1s and then the HDMI and USB going to the display I'm super happy with the setup and also like the fact that I can just unplug the screen and take it to my kitchen table or wherever else I may need it when testing rather than having to Lug around a monitor heck I can even use a computer's USB port to power it pretty cool I want to say thanks to ellacrow for sending this over and if you're interested I'll make sure to have links for everything down in the description that's about it for this one though so as always thank you so much for watching stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 28,842

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Id: aXvqnh8ZKRs

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023