In just a few short days, the greatest hackers and makers from all around the globe will descend on the Hall of Science in New York City to show off their wares. Our new guy [Adam] and myself will also be there, giving these makers our unending support, putting up a few posts about what they built, and giving out some Hackaday swag.
You may remember last year Hackaday got a free ride to Maker Faire thanks to the Red Bull Creation Contest. We put up a lot of posts and attempted to make some videos of all these great projects. I’d call those efforts a success, but the videos were pretty much inaudible thanks to how freakin’ loud Maker Faire is (and yes, we had a good shotgun mic). This time around we’ll drop the videos and go with a more traditional format. Expect a whole lot of Maker Faire posts on Hackaday Sept. 21 & 22.
If you’re going to the NYC Maker Faire and you see someone in a Hackaday T-shirt, say hi and we’ll give out some stickers. If you’re really cool (and we haven’t run out of them), we’ll throw in a T-shirt.
Since I’ll be around the NYC area that weekend, it’s also possible to do a few Hackerspace Tours for makerlabs in the tri-state area. If you’re part of a Hackerspace somewhere around NYC, send me an email and I’ll figure out how make that work. Bonus points to anyone who invites me to a Breaking Bad party,
Loud is right! Even with our small Ottawa Maker Faire with just 50 makers, I could record only at the few booths that were open before the fair started each day. That loudness is all good though, like a hive of busy maker bees. :)
Really this means you need to attend in person as a video isn’t going to capture the true experience.
use two mics, on behind you, and one in front of the speaker, later use software to remove the noise. This is how my two hearing aids work in sync via blutooth to remove background sound and “zoom” in on speech, though with a lot more complexity and real-time processing.
Or just use a directional mic. Mics have different pick up patterns because the ports to the side and behind allow air to pass through and mechanically cancel out off-axis sound.
Hackaday pls. Lapel mic.
Given that there will be at least one pulse jet engine operating, any sound recording outdoors will likely be hopeless, no matter the kind of microphone involved.
I will be exhibiting http://makerfaire.com/makers/frankenbike-and-friends/ and giving a talk on Sunday (12:30 on the Maker Square Stage) http://makerfaire.com/makers/mechanical-artillery-101-yes-you-can-be-a-siege-engineer/
As a solo exhibitor, I will also look forward to your coverage. If you exhibit, you are stuck at your booth, and don’t have a chance to see exhibits outside your immediate neighbors.
Stop by my exhibit, and I will trade you a nerds sticker for a hackaday sticker.
> Stop by my exhibit, and I will trade you a nerds sticker for a hackaday sticker.
Done.
A super-cardioid wireless mic like news reporters use has a very narrow pickup pattern and, when used up close, (interviewer holding mic to interviewee’s mouth), has extreme off-axis rejection. A shotgun mic (hyper-cardioid) is better for distance, but better off-axis rejection comes with a compromise: hyper-cardioid patterns, while rejecting almost everything on the sides, have a rear lobe of increased pick-up, resulting in sound bleeding in from the rear (AND, at distance, they’ll pick up all the reflections inherent in the trade-show type of space you’re recording in). Lapel mics are good for speech reproduction, but in loud environments, it’s omni-directional polar pattern has NO axis of rejection, causing it to pick up noise from all around).
We could always pull apart your shotgun mic, do some hacking, and end up with a bluetooth streaming/controlled variable polar pattern mic (with a microcontroller, you could sample the environment, introducing auto-adapting noise cancellation (or rotate the capsules to stereo XY configuration, or mid-side field recording. Add an SD card, record to .wav, now there’s no need to stream, but bluetooth control over capsule placement/voltages for a remote-controlled variable polar pattern/ multi-channel high-quality field recorder). I like to dream big…
Recording quality audio with your video is possible, but only if considered a separate discipline: purchase & properly use the right equipment, or let’s make a hack out of it!
J. Hoffman
audio engineer/inventor
Look forward to seeing you there again, Hackaday slash Brian! I’ll be bringing more about graphing calculator hacking and learning programming with calculators, and I managed to convince more of my crew to come help out this year.