We are improvising at the law, so this was the one that was kept until late yesterday,
but we thought, well, we really wanted to let these guys show what they have done in the last year.
What you see here is a photo of the new Muslim video box, and this is what we are going to introduce you today.
I mean, you see it in action pretty much all weekend.
I would like to share some details because I think it's really an awesome piece of technology.
These guys deserve all of this for that.
So you may remember, in almost video boxes, they were fully made out of wood.
They were the first iteration, I think we built them in 2014, and they've served us well for a particular number of years,
but last year we just, well, for a 20.4 edition, we had decided that, well, it was decided to say goodbye to them,
simply because they were falling apart physically.
I mean, the screws were falling out, and the hardware inside was absolutely impossible to replace.
There were components in there that were in the infrastructure anymore.
So any spare parts were super expensive to think.
So last year, within a little bit of an in between solution with something in the same case,
as that you see today, it was all off the shelves apart.
So it was just a USB 4-core ethernet switch and physical interface.
The USB hub, the USB HDMI crever, and then some ports at the outside.
So it was no, you know, very functional.
It needed a laptop to operate, so every room needs to have two laptops.
There were some issues with this cover, as well as running this setup.
So it decided, well, let's improve for next year, all of you were planning to land this, maybe one or two editions.
And I had a long, well, I had long been dreaming of the solution.
That's what we wanted to come up with.
And so during last fall, I think even Sunday evening.
I started talking to these two guys in the lock,
because it was pointed out that, well, maybe these kind of snow,
if thing were to be a button designing hardware and at least,
or at least if we tend to very well think how.
So that's when, you know, I started explaining what I had in mind,
and actually my dad had independently of whatever we were going to be dreaming,
or he started working on something similar with the idea of hopefully in mind.
So speaking of, you know, the synchronized brainwaves or whatever we call it.
Anyway, I'm going to let these guys introduce to you what they've built,
how they did it, and we'll give you some more details.
So this is Dexter, and this is my dad.
I think there's also a really big round of applause.
Okay, well, I am going to go over some of the components here,
but basically what this set of all does is take a video stream
from a capture card, which on this diagram is here,
and send that video stream through a computer, the RageXA export,
and then, you know, my performance.
And then, have that video streamed over network.
In addition to that, we have some integrated,
we have integrated some components that make the life of the video team a lot easier.
One of them is the network switch that allows the loud,
daisy-chaining the boxes, so we don't need to deploy extras,
which isn't the room, as you can see.
We don't have a switch here, we just connect one of the boxes to the other one.
And also, we have the audio mixer integrated inside the box,
so that we don't need an external mixer in order to master the audio.
So, in that case, we don't need that much external hardware,
and the whole setup is quite cheap, even though the box itself is not so cheap.
So, the first component we're going to talk about in a bit of detail is the audio mixer,
that was mainly designed by my friend, so we can say a bit about it.
Yeah, I started the initial design of the board after last year, first time,
because I saw the really nice new boxes with a thing button top,
but besides that, I came back up the room still and locked the audio mixer.
And while the laptop could be managed remotely by the video team,
the audio mixer had to be managed in room,
and that was not ideal for audio monitoring.
So, I found the TNC, the board is in here above,
and that has a pretty neat library that you can really easily make an audio mixer
from this board by just working in various audio components,
and to make it work for first time, I decided to build this board that's around it,
and it has a few X-LAR inputs, so that the wireless microphone sets.
I'm using that now, can be plugged into the box,
and then we mix together and set off over the network to the video operation center.
Let me just enter check.
I think I can show you, yes, I can probably show you the control interface.
No, let me see, like this.
This is the control interface for the video setup that we all see
from the video control room.
So, you can see that we can remotely control all of the levels.
We see a graph of how we've been talking.
We see previews and things like that,
basically those sliders,
they're end up sending commands to the audio mixer board that does the next thing.
Yeah, yeah, this is basically,
initially, based around the example board from teensy,
they have a shield you put on top of a teensy,
and it gives you a single stereo input and stereo output for headphones,
and I basically took that design and devoted to have more channels
and add some interfacing chips in between to give it balanced audio
to interface with all the more professional equipment that's connected to it.
And there's a few more features that are not currently in use at first
them.
Like, you have the connector to have internally an audio jack connected to the HDMI frame grabber,
so we can have the audio from the laptop from the people preventing,
but that is not working this year, hopefully next year.
And all the way here, there's an extra header that can have a decks receiver,
because the wireless microphones are actually
technically wireless telephones,
and the plan must to make a receiver there,
so we don't have separate receivers on the box here to have all the audio,
so less components and less things can go wrong.
I think that's pretty much accomplished the audio board.
Yeah, and we also have this file that is basically doing everything
that wasn't already done in some other place in the box.
It has four ports to charge microphones,
so with these cables connected there,
we just charge the microphone receivers,
so that you don't need to run extra cables in order to power the receivers.
There's also a USB pass through port.
The charging ports are actually isolated,
as to not to close ground loops through the microphone ports,
and we also have a temperature sensor on that board.
We have a fan controller that controls the fans that have been making
a really annoying noise in this room today,
but this should be fixed for next year.
Yeah, basically this is the catch all board,
that's everything that's not done somewhere else.
And we also have the network switch that is extremely interesting,
also designed primarily by more than 10.
Yes, it is actually pretty much the same thing as the network switch
used last year, because that is a 5-board switch
that's a USB network interface in it to make it appear like it's a 4-board
USB network interface,
and that one was not very reliable.
So this is basically a copy of the design of the very common 5-board
switch you might find online,
and it's basically the same design,
but with a few components, beefed up, so it's more reliable,
the other ones are prone to overheating.
And more importantly, one of the 5-metic ports is facing backwards,
so we don't have to have a cable around the outside of the case
to plug in the computer that's inside.
In addition to that, there's this connector
that connects over to the computer inside,
and that allows this switch to actually be a managed switch,
and that is used to show the status of all the switch ports in the front.
So network issues can be developed easier,
and also, again, this is used for remote monitoring
of all the hardware and for them.
Yeah, and also we have this bit that is actually the computer.
This is off the shelf, rather, XAX4 single-board computer,
that is X86 based,
so there's a proper Intel and 100 processor in there,
so that we can make use of the video encoder that's inside,
and they have achieved the exact Raspberry Pi layout,
so the board has the exact phone factor as a Raspberry Pi,
and also the GPIO header,
and the way they implement that is that they have an onboard RP2040 microcontroller,
that actually controls the GPIO,
and is connected to an internal USB to the Intel processor.
And we use that in order to control different things around the box,
like the fans, the display, that's on the front,
and to monitor status.
And the display basically looks like this.
It's an off the shelf, we've shared this play,
that has three components left, middle and right,
and basically we showed the status of the box,
the video screenshot, and things like that,
and also levels from the audio board,
so that audio can easily be debugged.
And yeah, this is also connected to the GPIO header,
so it's images are sent to the display over SPI.
And one of the more challenging aspects of the entire box
was doing the whole mechanical assembly in a way
that allowed us to produce more than 70 of these devices
and just several days of assembly lines done by volunteers,
by both the volunteers,
and the whole thing is completely open source,
hardware mechanically,
and also all of the PCBs inside a open source
apart from the HDMI capture card,
which we're planning to open source next year.
And you can view both the mechanical
and the PCB designs on GitHub,
including the aluminium base plate,
that's on the bottom of each box that was designed by us,
and then manufacture by laser cutting.
Also we had some interesting things we have to do,
while manufacturing, for example,
we had to do sort of assembly lines for assembling the box,
and for preparing different components.
We had to disassemble the off-the-shelf capture cards
in order to get the PCBs out of them,
and also the RADXA computers had the wrong whole diameter,
just by 0.1 millimetre,
so we had to drill through all 420 holes
on all the RADXA computers we have.
So I will now show you a video from the volunteers assembly line
we did while drilling the holes.
Yeah, and to do the whole assembly process,
this had to be planned in advance,
and we had made this flow chart that lets us decide
what to do before the next task,
and basically in the end we have an assembled box.
Yes, I think that said, get heavy.
Well, so now you have a little bit of an idea of what is in the box,
but I really want to emphasize these guys they've done
the most wonderful job.
I had a lot of ideas and suggestions that,
hey, maybe we should add this or that,
or even in the middle of the design station,
maybe we should add a post through USB 3 port,
because there's another conference,
which uses a slightly different set-up from Fauston,
and I thought by adding that port,
we can also support their use case.
So these guys have been amazing.
I mean, they always say they don't know what they're doing,
but I suspect they're alive,
because they came up with this all by themselves,
so it's seriously, thank you guys, thank you so much.
And so one of the things that we've been,
I mean, one of the ideas behind this box is that,
I mean, it's as open sources,
we could get it at this stage,
there's still the rough set,
which is central part,
but then there's the HDMI capture card,
as Dexter mentioned.
We, I mean, my friend has a reference,
as already assembled some kind of design to replace that,
because that's currently still an off-the-shelf part
for which we don't really have all the designs,
and we've not really reverse engineered to firmware yet,
but we're going to get there next year,
and so next year there's going to be even more,
so I'll start with one of the ideas
that we have is that we want to encourage
all our conferences to use our hardware,
so we've built extra boxes,
and we'll be lending them out of the given them away,
in some cases, because it makes more sense,
and just shipping it back and forth all the time,
to all our conferences who can then hack
and improve all our setup,
so that's one of the design that we have here.
I think there's maybe some time for questions,
if you have questions.
Sure?
One question, would you have the design?
Is it possible to display the rules,
to project some of the ways that comes from
a video on your room, right?
If we go into an architect,
if we represent a computer,
it's just as deep there after the computer,
or we can output from the controller to the computer.
Currently the video is going straight
into the capture card, and it has a loop output,
and that is used for the project,
or so we cannot really do anything with a signal.
But what we have designed now for it,
that can maybe replace it,
has an HDMI switch included after the loop out,
so we can decide whether we show the feed from the laptop,
or show the feed from the internal computer,
so we can at least have something on the screen
when there's no percent of the laptop floating.
I don't actually have an overlay of stuff over there,
that will be really hard,
because that would require some feed of mixing hardware,
and that gets quite expensive.
Would you have sorry to get the question?
Oh yes, the question was,
can the current hardware do overlay all the projected image?
So we can read, well, we could,
with the next board replace,
the projected image, but I'm overlaying something,
so it's not in the,
do we have a use case for it?
I mean, it's something that you would point.
We want the attendance,
what?
All right.
Okay.
So far, these guys have never said that something isn't possible,
so we did test doing,
actually we managed to do an overlay by accident,
during the,
because we were testing,
if we can get the video go through the Rode XA
through an elephant peg pipeline,
and then out of its port with minimal latency,
and we could get it down to 500 milliseconds of latency,
and at some point we accidentally blended with elephant peg,
an image onto the video.
So it should be possible with this CPU,
but I don't think latency will be good enough for a generic use case.
Maybe for remote talks,
it will be fine,
if you manually delete the audio by this amount,
but yeah,
it would be Jankey.
Oh yeah?
We'll have to repeat it,
but you might want to look at the,
the Rode 5B plus,
maybe eventually it's a bit more expensive,
but it has its own HDMI capture.
Okay.
That I got about 2.0.
It does have,
it's my capture,
but it's an arm platform,
so video encoding on it is pretty hidden miss,
and it's usually the last thing they had support for on Linux.
So all of the vendor stack on it,
it's open source and media.
There's no blocks in this one.
So it's a good one.
And there's many people that are at the conference,
that are actually working this year on the encoder,
so we can have mainline Linux support for them.
This is going to be,
I say look at it,
because this is going to be a platform we will support,
and that for anything of related WebR-Dc's remains,
but it's going to be a good platform.
Okay, so what was the exact board you were proposing,
so that I can be to the top 5B plus plus,
it's just a fixed version of this.
Okay, the Rode 5B plus,
so we might have missed that one,
but basically for the last five years,
every year we've been doing this research bit,
that's basically,
is on there yet,
in terms of encoding,
and usability for encoding,
and the...
Sorry?
So the question was which code that we use,
we're currently doing H264,
but we might want to move to something more efficient
and more open in the future.
But, yes, so far the verdict has been
that our support is still janky enough for it to cause it,
to cause issues during something like pause them,
and we're not ready to commit to that yet,
but maybe in a couple of years,
if the guys who support this drivers
stuck get it toward reliably enough.
Well, look at that, I think it's a bit...
Yes, I think.
This is the worksheet RK3588, right?
Correct.
Okay, yes, the year ago when we looked at the support
was not there yet, at least.
Yeah, having mainline,
then the support is our requirement that we've been posed
on this project,
and that's why we're using X86 at the moment.
Yes, there's also a problem with that.
I'm curious what is the total post of part of this process?
So the question was what the total cost of the boxes,
this one's for Harry?
So it's not easy to give you an exact number,
because so many things happened in different phases,
and we've recycled hardware and incurred extra cost
because this was a rush production phase.
I think some things could have been made a little bit cheaper.
I think one box will sit around maybe 450 euros,
450 euros, something like that.
Considering that it includes everything
and the kitchen sink, it's not too bad.
But the problem is we need to scale it to 30 rooms,
so every year we spend this at least times 30.
Thank you so much.
Any feedback on the power plane?
You didn't use the earlier name?
Well, nine.
Okay, so the question is about the power lanes?
I will give that to the extra.
Okay, so you're asking what voltages
and what power supplies we have.
Well, I would say they weren't like huge roadblocks,
but they were like lots of small issues to go through.
For example, one of the start,
we were trying to see what kind of power breaks to use,
and we were using another version of the RadexA computer
that was only powered by USB-C,
but by a fake version of USB-C power delivery
that actually expects 12 volts,
asks for 12 volts,
but doesn't check if it has got 12 volts.
And then works best if you supply it with nine volts instead.
But apart from these issues with the current version,
we basically are using a version of the computer
that can also work from just 12 volts on the header
and that's fine.
We also had some issues related to filtering the power to the fans,
but that's just normal.
We have lots of regulators all over the place
because every single component needs different voltages.
I think the most exotic one is the 1.1 volts for the switch chip.
And we also have done multiple experiments
with filtering and eliminating ground loops with the audio board
while keeping the cost down,
and at the end with that, I think.
In the end, we just decided to power it from USB
and just filter it well,
and that had the best, like, price-performance characteristics
in terms of power supply.
So yeah, it was okay.
There weren't major old blocks there.
I think it actually worked.
I think overall, things went really well.
I haven't heard any major issues with the video setup.
The hardware has been stellar.
I mean, we've identified a couple of areas for improvement,
but basically for what is the very first production run.
This has been excellent.
The other question is, if the network chip on the board
can be used to make a few networking stuff more efficient
like ICMP, multicasting, or IGMP, multicasting, and freelance,
and yes, this chip does support it.
We are not using it for this year, at least.
For now, that's only reading out the status from the board,
but it is possible to make a fully managed switch
out of this switch support for all the features.
I don't think that multicast streaming will be really,
that you will fall on for STEM, because it's basically all the boxes
are doing just a single stream to the operations center,
and there, I think, it's handled.
So we don't have to split any of the signals anywhere.
So multicast doesn't really help in our case, I think.
Let's do this.
QOS, I think, only starts helping if we overload links
or get closer offloading it, and that should not really happen
with a network infrastructure.
All of this is run on a dedicated network,
so we basically have gigabit and to end
from every room to the encoding laptop.
It's not really an issue in our case,
but yeah, it's an option if everything becomes necessary.
We didn't want to add the complication at this point,
because we didn't really see a USB thread, but sure.
I mean, the good thing about this design is that it's completely modular,
so if one day we don't like a certain component,
we just swap it out and don't have to replace the entire box.
So anyone else?
These are some special solutions,
we don't improve objects, we just manage.
So I mean, it's more fine, but sometimes,
I notice it's easier, I don't know,
especially for nice.
So I just need to see what's the source of this problem
and how can we please?
Right, so the question is about the sometimes,
it happens that there is some decentralization
between the audio and the video,
and where that comes from,
and what the source of the problem is.
So I think texture can answer that one.
So the problem with the audio video, sorry.
Synchronization between the two streets,
the speaker slides, yeah.
Oh, between the speaker and the speaker.
This should not be a problem.
So the image capture by the camera,
or the camera, for example, today,
is presentation about,
and people contain them.
It was quite noticeable.
Okay, so this,
and it's a UBC.
Yeah, it is.
Basically, I think that does not implement the timestamp.
From there, so it's unable to remove the delay from the receiver,
and even if you do it, it's not always working.
Okay, so, what we got was that,
FMPEG has an issue with synchronizing UBC streams
from video for Linux,
which is the case,
but we have another issue with the re-streamer.
That's completely unrelated to the boxes
that is basically,
when the network drops between the box and the re-streamer,
the re-streamer catches up in a weird way
that sometimes these synchronizes,
and this is just a software problem.
It's not something that is a problem in general,
it's something that we just haven't got to fixing.
And the other such thing that we haven't fixed yet,
is that the slides and the other part of the talker
are not synchronized at all,
and that's just work to be done in the future.
Those are two separate streams that just need to be synchronized
in the video center.
Yes, all of them are connected.
Yeah.
The pt question?
Oh yeah.
So the question is,
is there software on the box,
and is it available online?
Yes, everything that runs on the box
is available at github.com slash false-dem slash video.
And all of the software that we're written,
so there is firmware for two of the hardware components,
the RP2040 and the teensy.
That's inside the repo public.
And also, we have some software that runs on the RabyxA itself.
It's mostly written in Python,
and it's available, part of it is available in that video repo,
and another part is available in infrastructure repo.
And there is also some software that we've made
to control Vockton Mix,
which is the software we used to mix this streams
in the video center,
and this is also public and the infrastructure repo.
Yes.
There's certainly plans to replace the video camera
without any source.
So the question is,
are there any plans to replace the video camera
with an open source one?
We haven't actually talked of that,
but maybe more than can elaborate on
the status of open source video cameras,
and if they exist.
It is very hard to make an open source video camera.
The hardware is messy,
the software is messy.
A color science is really, really hard.
So I don't think it will be really close
in the future that first-hand can use open source cameras for it,
and especially cheap ones.
It is pretty hard to get hardware for it,
especially if you want something that's comparable
to the current cameras here,
that has a pretty large sensor,
and even getting the parts for that is expensive.
It's more cheap to get a camera.
Can you remove the sensor?
Actually, it's so much cheaper.
The cameras are actually not owned by us,
so we rent these cameras,
most of them we rent,
so that's one part that we don't own,
so we didn't really have the need to look to deeply into it.
Priorities first.
Anybody else?
Yeah, I don't know.
Can I ask you a question?
Sure, I mean, I mean, I'm...
I can avoid that, just post it,
but something so big.
Yeah, so the question was other updates of the release papers of this.
And not that much,
but I have all my physical block
of you post yourself about various components of this box,
and I don't have a nice light with the request,
but maybe can be in the metadata for the talk.
It's fine, something else valuable?
Yes, this does that.
just do that. It has a lot of unrelated stuff on it. It's blockedobricid.no. This is my
company website. This is my blog. Let's see if I can scroll and find something for
this is the switch. This is the early iteration. Okay. So this is actually connecting
the prototype for false them up to an arm computer because we had Linux magic.
It is possible to integrate it in such a way that the four external ports here show up
as actual network interfaces in Linux. And those are fully functional network
interface and not like if you have feelings for that and you circle interfaces.
So all the tools like F2 just work on it and you can see the port status and change
like the configuration of if it should be automatically gigabit or not. And if you
then take those ports and put them in the Linux bridge together then the Linux will
configure the switch that those ports will be handled in hardware. So it's hard to
actually write the networking in that way. And that was not needed at all for
false them. But it is possible and I wanted to try it.
Are you relying on the university network or are you using your own custom network?
So the question is whether we're relying on the university network or using our own.
We are mostly relying on the university network. So we have a very close cooperation
with the university network team. And basically they reconfigure half of the network
for us just for the weekend. They have permanent configuration, you know, just partly
disabled, partly just enabled all the time just for this one weekend. So those guys
also really great. Without them we couldn't do this at all. So we use their infrastructure
but we do all of our own. So all of the core is ours. We just back hold everything to our
core and we do our stuff, our own stuff here. Anything else?
Okay. Well, thank you for being here. I'm really glad.
Thank you.
I'm also very glad that Fossil is finally over.
And we're almost almost just a couple of times.