#updates - BrixIT Blog

April 2025

Martijn Braam — Thu, 01 May 2025 12:39:48 -0000

OpenSwitcher

Fixed packaging issue after introducing the new supersource panel
Implemented the buttons to save and clear the startup state of an ATEM device
I have half a working implementation of the camera control panel now, using the generalized code I made for drawing the palette panels.

BodgeOS

Deployed a test setup of the build system on a seperate build server
Many small fixes to various APKBUILDs to make the base distribution buildable in automatic systems. This is mainly missing dependencies.
Created a status page for the build system and implemented build ordering correctly.

Megapixels

Fixed up config location searching to also scan ~/.config again since this makes it possible to have overrides for the Flatpak version
Fix bug where not all model names were checked, only the most specific one. This broke the original PinePhone.
Fix up the DCP search path to match the config search code again.
Implement stride throughout the codebase since this value is not predictable from the mode+resolution as I thought.
Improve logging for the libmegapixels utilities
Pulled in fixes to make video recording work in the flatpak

Other

Pulled in a few changes in the https://hackerboards.com/ database
Made a small browser game at https://brixitcdn.net/game/
Wrote a blog post about the browser game
I've been building guitar pedals, it's suprisingly easy. Also in the process was trying to figure out how to print nice pedal cases and made a video about some tests.

March 2025

Martijn Braam — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 11:52:42 -0000

I was planning to make an 2.0-alpha2 release of Megapixels and related components but that got delayed a bit now with having to deal with GTK 4.17 breaking everything and finding some API things that need to be broken before I mark them final.

TurboCase

Added support for the --flip parameter, this makes it generate a case where the PCB is mounted to the lid instead of the base of the case.
Added a footprint for the 128x32 2.23 inch OLED display

OpenSwitcher

Rewrite the code for generating the sidebars. Most of the sidebar panels are now completely defined by code instead of .ui files and GtkBuilder. This made the controls a lot more consistent and it's a lot easier to add more panels.
Added controls for the SuperSource unit including a preset mechanism. Also added a few more of the SuperSource protocol commands to the python library.
Started writing a manual for OpenSwitcher at https://docs.openswitcher.org/manual/overview.html
Created the initial version of a firmware update utility for the ATEM switchers. A few of the newer models support updating the firmware over ethernet which is a lot easier to implment than the USB firmware updating. So far I've partially figured out the meaning of the header in the firmware update files, but I'd very much like to know exactly how it works before publishing it as "The updater tool" in case it starts bricking devices. It does seem to work on the ATEM Mini Extreme though with the latest firmware version.

Megapixels

A lot more contributions have come in for the Megapixels codebase, mostly clean ups for issues found in the alpha1 release.
A flatpak has been added since GTK 4.17 completely broke GPU acceleration on the PinePhone and Librem 5. This still needs a better, more permanent solution.The flatpak is at https://flatpak.brixit.nl/megapixels2.flatpakref
I've been working on fixing up 10-bit modes, it turns out that the padding I thought was constant actually wasn't. This is an API breakage in libdng and libmegapixels so I'm glad I found that before tagging a final 2.0 release for the components.

BodgeOS

Made progress in creating a new build system to generate the BodgeOS packages. It will run on my lx2k and a small x86 machine and natively build x86 and aarch64 packages that way. Then the build server got delayed a bit because I dropped the x86 server on my foot.

Use VMs! they are less heavy!

Other small things

Updated BoardDB to run on a more modern Flask+dependencies version.
Updated Spook to run on more modern Flask and implement changing post URLs. It also now has a seperate RSS feed for these monthly updates.
Added a resistor divider finder in partlint to find the closest option for a resistor divider made from only LCSC basic parts.
Made a video mixing thing in Golang while learning Golang, it mixes 2 v4l2 inputs and a static image into an OpenGL window.
Made a video about the BBQ thermometer board I've been working on. Source is available on https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/bbq-board
Wrote a blog post about Megapixels 2.0, going into the details of the GTK breakage.
Implemented VLAN support for the OSHW switch in the FOSDEM video box.
Created a WIP kernel module for the FOSDEM box to integrate the hardware in the box better with Linux.

Februari 2025

Martijn Braam — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 23:14:00 -0000

Megapixels

The Mobian developers working on testing the Megapixels 2.0 alpha release is revealing a series of small issues, mainly things that make packaging a bit harder for Debian like code failing on big endian machines (while none of the supported hardware is big endian of course, would be fun to see a powerpc phone though...)

A few of these things have been patched up by a-wai in the packaging process and are integrated in Megapixels now. There's also a few issues with GTK4 and opengl support in Debian it seems which might make it necessary to use Flatpaks there.

FOSDEM stuffs

The video boxes are being loaned out to a few other conferences now, for example FOSSASIA summit 2025 in Bangkok, the hardware setup around the boxes here is completely different with USB cameras being used instead of HDMI cameras so the FOSDEM video team has been working on firmware adjustments to run on a single box per room.

Part of those fixes is that the USB side of the audio board had to be stable to mix in audio from the microphones since it no longer could be looped through the camera, so a few days have been spend on reworking parts of the audio board firmware to run at 44.1Khz like the Teensy audio lib is supposed to be used instead of the 48Khz it ran at while doing FOSDEM.

I've also created a patch for the power management controller of the box that rewrites the entire fan control loop, this should fix all the issues with the fans being extremely noisy while the video box is running, as you might've heard if you were in one of the rooms at FOSDEM.

I've also started working on a few parts for a new revision of the audio mixer hardware to improve the dynamic range, while there was now full remote control possible of the audio there were still a few cases where things couldn't be fixed, like the output volume on the wireless receivers being set so high that the input circuitry was clipping, this is what happened on my microphone while doing the FOSDEM video box talk. The fix for this is reworking the audio front-end to run at a higher voltage and fixing up the power supply parts to make that not noisy.

The recording of the talk is now also released! You can watch it at https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6832-fosdem-videobox-2025/

OpenSwitcher

Had to make a few fixes to correctly regenerate the FW per HW list for the latest version of the official ATEM firmware.
Actually ordered an ATEM mini extreme now, it's still on the way but it should be a help for implementing more of the features available on the slightly more expensive hardware

Other

Created EDIDor, an online EDID blob editor. It was needed to figure out how to patch the firmware for the capture cards used in the FOSDEM box and helps with dealing with the EDIDs for the Blackmagic Design ATEM HDMI control protocol.
I started working on the BodgeOS build system that will dispatch APKBUILD changes in the aports git repository to the build servers. So far this code is stored in ~martijnbraam/bodge-build
I've been testing LTC syncing camera takes on BMD cameras and been messing around with a half broken anamorphic lens, producing this: https://youtu.be/G6PsIh85WGA
Been fixing up a vintage Roland SDE-330 delay unit, maybe I'll make a video about it.
I have a 50% working firmware now for a custom PCB to control a DJI Ronin RS2 gimbal with a passthrough for HDMI BMD camera control, also needs a lot of polish to be ready for general use.

Januari 2025

Martijn Braam — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 23:17:00 -0000

Megapixels

A few small fixes have come in following the alpha release of Megapixels 2.0, one important one that fixes a memory leak in the AAA code. Slowly and steadily this is all moving towards an alpha2 release, maybe a beta release if everything runs smoothly.

BodgeOS

Patched abuild and apk to store the relative position of the APKBUILD in the aports repository in the package metadata so it can be shown on https://pkgs.bodgeos.org, not all packages have been rebuild yet though so many are missing this extra metadata.
Packaged everything up to Firefox and got everything working in Sway. This required bringing up a few compiler runtimes like rust, a bit extra llvm stuff and more mesa things.
Packaged a series of convencience tools for Sway like Wofi.
Did initial bringup of BodgeOS for aarch64 using the LX2K machine.

FOSDEM

This month was the lead-up to getting everything finished for the FOSDEM event in Brussels. All the hardware ended up getting built in time and there have been no major issues during the livestreaming of the whole event. It has been amazing to see all the pieces of hardware and software I've been working on the last year come together and produce a functional and stable livestreaming solution.

Last patches to the software were done on the Friday a few hours before the start of FOSDEM which is a small fix to reduce the amount of fan noise coming from the boxes, this still needs a few improvements as you might've heard while being in one of the rooms.

This year I also gave my first talk! It will be online soon-ish at https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6832-fosdem-videobox-2025/

Other projects

Fixed a few small issues in miniseries, mainly to better visualize the data coming in without connecting it to a Grafana instance.
Released version 6 of lsplug, This includes a few fixes that have been merged a while back for better device identification, it also fixes a crash when the hwdata package is not installed.
A new release was made for bare-py, the Python implementation of the BARE packing format. The main improvements are the test suite.

Blog

Released the 4th part of the BodgeOS series, going into building Firefox and making the initial aarch64 port of the distribution.

December 2024

Martijn Braam — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 23:19:00 -0000

Megapixels

The first tagged release of Megapixels 2.0 happened! So far it's a testing release for distributions and the people bringing up cameras on phones. There's also been a bunch of new supported devices added by the community, for example the Samsung Galaxy SIII

Added the SkipTry config option to work around V4L drivers that don't implement the _TRY versions of ioctls, or implement them but return bogus data. This also removed the need to have a PinePhone Pro specific workaround in libmegapixels.
Fixed crash in the libmegapixels test utilities when cameras don't have modes defined.
Added helper for printf'ing pixfmt codes
Added GPU pipeline for YUV modes so the preview for these cameras don't look garbled anymore and actually have the correct colors. In the case of YUV the GPU is only used for hardware accelerated colorspace transforms.
Released 2.0.0-alpha1 of Megapixels, libdng 0.2.1 and libmegapixels 0.2.0
Added another workaround for libtiff breaking its api in releases for Megapixels 1.8

BodgeOS

I started building a toy Linux distribution to figure out how distribution bootstrapping works in practice. 99% of time spend on this is waiting for large packages to build so this has been running in the background this month. It's very close to having a functional Firefox package now. In the process of bootstrapping this I also wrote a few more small things:

bindeps: a replacement for lldtree written in Hare that very quickly finds all the libraries required to run a binary. It was not super hard to outperform a shell script.
Hare support for abuild. This adds automatic hare: provides lines to built packages just like it adds so:, cmd: and py: lines to packages. This means you can also use the package browser now to search for hare modules to figure out which package it's in: example

Blog

No more relaxing end of the year than spending a bit of time to write blog posts, so that's what I did :)

Wrote a blog post about creating the BodgeOS distribution
The Megapixels 2.x alpha release also got a blog post.
Running BodgeOS on real hardware
And finally Getting a graphical desktop on BodgeOS

November 2024

Martijn Braam — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 23:22:00 -0000

Somehow I spend half this month reviving dead laptops that are required for live productions. In the free moments I've made a bit of progress in Megapixels and dealt with a lot of the general busywork of having a lot of random open source repositories and still haven't managed to get to all of them. Hopefully I'll manage to fix up a few more things now we've entered the last month of the year already :)

Megapixels

It's nice to see a few people trying to bring up libmegapixels on their devices. It's a great way to find more edge-cases that haven't been dealt with and things that need better documentation.

Written new documentation for the libmegapixels config files since people are trying to port devices now and I've realized the only reference for the config format is the blog post.
Fixed up the license for the libmegapixels repository
Kristian fixed up the color matrices in libdng so this can get passed through nicely from Megapixels

RackCat

I had to build a audio projection rack this month and ran into the issue I've ran into many times before when designing racks for events. It's annoying to visualize the rack beforehand and figure out where everything will fit. It would also be nice to have a quick and visual way to see how things will match together in a rack that's loaded from both sides.

I've spend a weekend making the initial version of RackCat: a WebGL based 19" rack design tool.

It has a view to see the rack cut in half to visualize the depth of equipment and two perspective views for the front and back. It has a lot of rough edges in the procedurally generated rack case and the equipment is only blank plates with thickness for now.

The plan is to add a database to this with hardware dimensions of various popular rackmounted devices and also have preset dimensions of common rack cases. Pasting frontpanel pictures on the devices should also technically be pretty easy but I've not figured out the UX for it yet.

You can play around with the tool at https://brixitcdn.net/rackcat/

Other projects

The OSHW thermometer project I mentioned in the previous post is coming along nicely. The first hardware revision is nearly perfect but the display isn't working. It does allow pushing readings to MQTT now though and has SNMP support. The firmware is at https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/bbq-firmware
Modelled a few entities for betamine to help that project get closer to a perfect recreation of Minecraft 1.7.3 beta.
Made a new firmware revision for the audio mixers for FOSDEM, looks like the hardware is still on track for FOSDEM 2025. The new revision adds dynamics and EQ controls for the inputs to help with microhone handling noise.
Received the breakout boards for the Teranex frontpanel project. I've mapped out most pins on the propriatary connector but am now stuck at figuring out the controller type for the display. The buttons, leds and rotary encoder are functional though.
Fixed up a few installation issues with Miniseries and made a second production setup mirroring an installation with InfluxDB and all the glue scripts I've previously written for that. It seems to keep up nicely but lacks a few calculation options I require for that setup.

October 2024

Martijn Braam — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 23:25:00 -0000

OpenSwitcher

Attempted to get the windows build working again but this whole part of python packaging with GTK seems thoroughly broken
Implemented the mask-enable button for upstream keyer settings
Pushed new flatpaks

Megapixels

No code updates, mostly did merging fixes from other developers:

Fixed build of postprocessd through meson
Fix for the preview not working after switching windows
Working on the calibration data for a few devices now

Other projects

Made an update to the fathub.org generator to make the website slightly less plain
Reverse engineered the Empenada recipe and added to fathub
Created brecord, a fork of arecord from Alsa to fix the annoying issue where it tries to default to 8-bit 8Khz audio if you specify nothing. brecord defaults to whatever the hardwre likes instead and at least 16 bit 48k if possible.
Created the miniseries time-series database with integrated MQTT receiver
I'm halfway through reverse-engineering the Teranex Smart Panel pinout and a custom breakout PCB I designed is now on the way, this is for attachment to a custom Raspberry Pi compute module carrier I'm designing
Created the initial revision of a OSHW cooking thermometer since the "smart" thermometers are horrible and cloud-locked but I do want to have temperature in MQTT for long processes.

Blog

Wrote an article about the miniseries development

September 2024

Martijn Braam — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 23:27:00 -0000

Short update this month, slightly delayed because I had a vacation out of the country in this month. Most of the stuff I did this month is random KiCad work that is not really referenced anywhere publicly (yet), hopefully soon. Also if anyone has an idea for more youtube videos to produce... because that's fun to do but hard to find ideas :D

OpenSwitcher

Added an example script that implements a simple ducker in the ATEM audio mixer as demonstration on how to use the audio meter data using the pyatem module
Added a setup.py script for the proxy module
Fixed documentation rendering on https://docs.openswitcher.org/

Megapixels

Added lensfun integration in postprocessd
Created script to build all dependencies of Megapixels for development on a new device, so far only supports Alpine for dependency resolving
Fixed up the libmegapixels config for the original pinephone when running on newer kernels than what I originally wrote libmegapixels on.
Migrated postprocessd to use libdng for all image IO instead of depending on libtiff
Implemented image reading in libdng and more metadata handling

Merged in a bunch of contributions into the various Megapixels components:

Improved autoexposure and support for the dgain controls by Pavel
Autofocus support by Pavel

Electronics

Made the first revision of a LINE6 Variax-like board to put in a guitar for digital processing, Currently available at https://git.sr.ht/~martijnbraam/Freeiax
More production behind the scenes for FOSDEM live streaming equipment

August 2024

Martijn Braam — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 23:28:00 -0000

Photoflow

Fixed some ORM warnings due to sqlalchemy updates
Fixed the bug where using the arrow keys while editing text fields would switch pictures
Added a gear page to quickly jump to a collection of pictures taken with a specific lens or camera, or for film scans to filter by film stock.
Add a rewriterule system to automatically rename lenses and cameras when uploading images. For some reason my tamron lenses identify themselves as their nikon counterparts so this fixes that back on upload.

Megapixels

Created new icon for the autofocus feature
libdng now supports reading more DNG tags when loading existing files
Updated postprocessd to use libdng for reading pictures instead of linking against libtiff directly
Added lensfun support to postprocessd to apply corrections for cameras known in the lensfun database
Created a few vendor tags for adding lens correction metadata to DNG files. This is already done by several professional cameras but this is done with a random blob of data in the MakerNotes field. libdng now allows writing the lens correction tags (which contain the same data as what would be supplied by the lensfun database) and postprocessd now supports reading it.
Kristian implemented quite a bit of the parts needed for having all the autofocus stuff working in Megapixels

Partlint

The partlint utility is a python tool that parses kicad schematics to verify MPN info for parts in the schematic to fix this data becoming out-of-date pretty quick when you start copy-pasting symbols in the schematic and adjusting the values but not the MPN. For now it has support for LCSC numbers specifically with a built-in LCSC database to verify the part number somewhat matches the value/footprint picked for the part. For MPN it currently only supports pointing out that the MPN is re-used for parts with different values.

The linting is backed by an internal sqlite database and parts with other MPNs can be inserted into that.

Mixolydian / FOSDEM stuff

Pushed revision C of the audio mixer board to fix a few layout issues and add the connectors for the final integration with the rest of the FOSDEM hardware.
Made the teensy mixer control utility pull the channel names from the teensy instead of it being hardcoded.

Youtube

Made a video about reverse engineering the HDMI control protocol for the blackmagic design cameras https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujHOVqL1kcA

Dorian

For a complete chance of pace... I joined a GameJam in a team of 2 as game programmer. The game we made is Dorian, a puzzle platformer. This was a mad dash to learn how to use unity in 4 days to make a functional game with the theme "Build to scale". For the theme we implemented a feature where the scale of the player is adjustable with the scrollwheel which is required to solve some of the puzzles.

The end result got us to the 5000 place (out of 7000) which seems a bit low but I'm still pretty proud of the end result which contains only art made by us two during those four days including all the sprites, animations, music and sound effects.

It has both a windows and linux build available :)