Projects

OBS Studio Audio Track Hotkey Script

In December of 2020, OBS Studio update 26.1 was released and introduced a brand new feature: the ability to select which audio track is stored in the recording (“VOD”) of your Twitch stream. This gives streamers the power to separate audio feeds between what is broadcast live and what is stored for offline viewers. This is particularly useful for streamers who play rhythm games with copyrighted music and are looking to avoid DMCA strikes on their recorded or clipped content.

These track settings are straightforward for those that exclusively stream that sort of content, but doing these changes on the fly can be a pain for those who switch content types mid-stream. You need to open the “Advanced Audio Settings” GUI window, click the check boxes to change the selected audio tracks for the necessary sources, and then close the window.

I wrote a script to make things easier by mapping the audio track options to configurable hotkeys.

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By Dave Madison, ago

Keep Calm and Make Useless Things

Three years ago in April of 2018, maker and YouTuber Simone Giertz gave her own Ted Talk. It was titled “Why You Should Make Useless Things”, and it was about Simone’s own journey growing up while struggling with performance anxiety and perfectionism. She eventually found an outlet for those issues (and a career!) through building what she affectionately calls “shitty robots”.

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By Dave Madison, ago

Building DIY Split-Flap Displays

It’s incredible how far display technology has come. Nowadays LED walls are found at every major concert venue, flat panel televisions are ubiquitous, and everyone has a high resolution, full color LCD display in their pocket. It’s difficult to imagine that just a few short decades ago it was a struggle to create a large, dynamic display for an economical price.

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By Dave Madison, ago

3D Printed Light Stand PSU Mount

For my latest project I needed to film some footage in front of a greenscreen so I purchased some additional lighting: a pair of Neewer 660 LED video lights. These lights are a great budget option for videography but there’s one problem: the power supply. To drive the matrix of 660 individual LEDs the lights come with a standalone 15V, 3A power supply “brick” which connects to the unit via a barrel jack on the back. When the lights are raised up on a light stand this power supply dangles, only supported by the barrel jack and the soldered power wires within. This stresses the barrel jack and the power supply’s wiring which makes it more prone to failure.

To solve this problem, I designed and built a 3D-printed light stand mount for the Neewer 660 light’s power supply.

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By Dave Madison, ago

Modifying an RC Controller to Play Forza Horizon

I’ve always been fascinated by RC cars. The dynamics, the engineering, the speed… all wrapped up in a package that you can hold in one hand. Almost more than the cars themselves I’ve always loved the remotes. Ever since I watched Back to the Future and saw that awesome modded Futaba remote I’ve been captivated by the possibilities contained in one of those mystical black boxes. I was playing a racing game the other day when the idea came to me: what if I could modify an RC controller to control a racing game?

And just like that, I decided to convert an RC controller into a gamepad to play Forza Horizon 4.

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By Dave Madison, ago

Twitch Chat OwO Browser Extension

The news is currently very bleak. Just the pandemic alone is enough to make you want to never read the news again. Thankfully there’s a solution: “Bweaking NuwuS” (@BBCBweaking), a Twitter account that posts news stories passed through an “UwU” kaomoji filter to make them “cutesy”. The result is some serious dark comedy, with posts about corruption, sickness, and death translated into something exceedingly saccharine.

After reading a bit about the automation behind the news account, I thought it would be fun to do something similar and make a browser extension to convert Twitch chat into “OwO”-speak on the fly.

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By Dave Madison, ago