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.