Your Old Phone is Your New Stream Deck! (Macro Deck Tutorial)

did you know that you can turn your old phone into a DIY stream deck well in this video I'll show you how to do just that the only thing you will need is an Android phone a tablet or some other Android device with a touchcreen and the only requirement is that the device is running Android version 5 or newer the application I'll be using to achieve this is called macro deck and I can't honestly compare it with Elgato stream deck since I've never had one on hand but after about 2 months of using this setup I can tell you that it has every little feature someone like me would need it's free to use and I have no complaints about it some of you you may have already seen my DIY mcrad video I showed you how to build a custom keyboard and how to program it but after I found about macro deck I realized it's a much better option since you don't have to Source the components you don't have to solder anything and the most important thing you don't have to compile a firmware file every time you want to make a change to your setup the fact that you can change the icons is also a big plus mcro deck also allows you to create separate button folders so you can practically have infinite number of buttons the only little small thing I don't quite like about it is that there is no physical button feel which you get when you use a mechanical keyboard switch the whole setup contains of an Android app running on your Android device and a client on your PC the communication between the phone in the PC is wireless and is handled over the network so make sure that both devices are connected to the same Gateway you simply enter your host IP address followed by the client's port and connect everything you have set up in the PC client will be shown on the Android app and you can press each button to activate it first I'll show you how to get Bo apps running on your Android device and on the PC then I'll show you my setup so you get a better understand understanding of how the buttons work I'll show you how to install plugins and how to create buttons how folders work and finally how to create your own icons first let's install the macrock client on your PC go to the macro website and download Macro for Windows after it's downloaded install it and after it's installed open the application you can see your IP address and Deport here I'm doing this inside a virtual machine so that's why the IP looks weird you can set the number of rows and columns and the buttons are shown here next let's get the app running on the Android device device go to the macro website again go to the download section and download macrock for Android it's going to be an APK file and after it's downloaded you can continue by installing it after it's installed open the app and try to connect to the windows client the PC client will ask you if you want to allow the connection so make sure you do if everything went right you should see your buttons which should be blank at the moment before you begin creating custom buttons let's take a look at my setup so you get a better picture of how it may look in the end I have a six column and three row setup which fits nicely on my display I have a few buttons that start python and javascripts a few which open Windows applications and websites and then there are three buttons that use special functions to display data I need the first one shows the time the second one shows my CPU and GPU TS and the third one is connected with Spotify and it displays the current playing song If you find yourself in need of more buttons you can change the number of rows and columns or simply create more button folders the first time I opened macro deck app I honestly didn't know what to do to do I tried doing something for about 10 minutes and gave up the next day I watched some tutorials and then I figured it out basically before you do anything it would be best to download all the plugins you need first and then when you have the plugins already installed you will see all of the options that are available to you and it will be much easier to set up the buttons let's go to the plugin section and click on the online button here you can see all of the plugins you can install for me a must have is Windows utils it allows you to emulate key presses run command lines start applications and much more so that's going to be the first one if you want to display your Hardware temperatures you can install GPZ plugin just make sure GPZ is installed and running on your PC and the last one that's nice to try out at the beginning is the Spotify plugin you can install it but you'll have to connect your Spotify account via the API and the Spotify app has to be running on your computer if you want to use it with macrock I'm going to show you how to make your own buttons very soon but before I do there's one more thing I need to show you first as you've seen before you can create your own icons for the buttons icons are stored in icon PCS and and they can be installed from the plugin section or you can make your own if you wish go to the icon pack section and install the one you want then choose a blank button right click and select edit then you can double click on the buttons icon and here you can select the one you want there is a drop- down menu and it's used to select different icon packs if you wanted to create your own buttons you will need to create a new icon pack click on the plus icon and give your new icon pack a name then you can select your new icon pack and now you'll have an option to import an icon it needs to be a PNG jpeg BMP or file 1 to one aspect ratio and while designing mine I use a canvas of 500x 500 pixels but you can import any picture you download from the internet as well at this point I wanted to show you how to create buttons but then I realized that they are already created but are just blank so to edit a button right click on it and click edit as you've just seen you can change the buttons icon and here you can add the text to it the function button is located here and it's used for displaying data on the buttons icon as an example let's add a time date and and the day of the week align the label to the middle and this is our first button which is not actually a button since it doesn't do anything when pressed but the next one will let's edit another one I'll make this one open pra slicer the first thing I need is the pra slicer icon I'll download it from Google and import it into my icon pack I just created the icon is set and now we need to tell it what to do when the button is pressed click on the plus icon and select action to open an application we can use the windows utils plugin select start application and enter the path of your application you can find the path by right clicking on the app and going to properties then click open file location and you'll find the PATH at the top of the file explorer once you've entered it click okay and that's your first button that actually does something you can see that it asks you if you want to import the application icon which is actually a really great feature and I'll select yes so I can see if that one fits better than the one I just downloaded after you've created it we can test it by right clicking on the button and clicking on simulate option and as you can see the button works as intended now let's create a more complicated one I'll use Windows utils to enter a line command which starts start my python script then I'll use a delay to wait 500 milliseconds start another application and then open two websites in the browser and as you can see it works I don't have python installed in this virtual machine so the python script didn't start properly but you can see that the Bing Chiller application is up and running and both websites were opened the last thing I need to show you is how this Spotify plugin works you can find a guide on how to connect with the API in the plugin section and when you do you can use it as an action button to toggle playing skipe tracks repeat Etc or as a display button to display one of the functions that are available in the plugin to create a folder right click on the folder section and create a new one I'll name mine printer commands while in the root folder we'll need a button which will move us to the folder we just created so let's edit a blank button to do that I'll name it printer commands and select action I'll select mcrock folder and change folder I'll select my folder click okay click save click okay then I can right click and press simulate on press and now I'm inside the printer commands folder in order to be able to go back we'll need to create one more button that will move us back to the root folder again click edit give it a name create an action macro deck folder and select go to parent click okay save okay and you're done thank you so much for sticking to the end and I really hope I explained everything well I had a bit of trouble while setting this up for the first time so I decided to make my own video about it make sure to check some of my other videos and if you enjoyed watching make sure to like share and subscribe [Music]

Channel: Djambo

Views: 20,175

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Id: CPdzkCCfhWA

Length: 7min 35sec (455 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024