43oh.com Wasn’t Next To The Texas Instruments Booth

In addition to all the cool boards and booster packs found at Texas Instruments’ booth at Maker Faire, the folks from 43oh.com made a showing, but not next to the TI booth. In fairness, the TI booth was right across from NASA. 43oh is cool, but not NASA cool.

[Eric], known on the 43oh forums as [spirilis] showed off a few of the neat bits and bobs developed on the forums including a lightning detector, a VFD clock, a robot, and a whole lot of blinky things. There was an astonishing array of projects and boards at the booth, covering everything from OLEDs to motor drivers.

43oh is an interesting community centered around TI’s microcontrollers, like the AVRfreaks forum built around Atmel’s offerings. 43oh has a very active forum, IRC, and a store featuring projects made by members. It was great to see these guys at the faire, and we wish more of the homespun unofficial communities would make more of a showing at cons in the future.

Sorry about the mic cutting out in the video above. There was a sea of spewing RF near the booth. If anyone has advice for a *digital* wireless mic setup, we’re all ears. This is the current rig.

21 thoughts on “43oh.com Wasn’t Next To The Texas Instruments Booth

  1. Here’s a clue: don’t use wireless unless you have a good reason to. If your mics are going to be less than 50 feet away from your camera, you probably DON’T have a good reason to use wireless, and wireless will ALWAYS cause you trouble. Lots of people between the camera and the mic? There’s an answer for that, too: use a portable recorder WIRED to your mic, and sync it later. RF is just not a reliable option in environments that are FULL of electronic devices. This is ten years of event recording talking.

    1. Haha. Some years ago I moved to Cortex M, and particularly STM32L, but I still use 43Oh.com quite a lot to see what people are doing. It is a good forum. The only think like it is AVRfreaks, or maybe the Arduino forum, but AVR is even less with-it than MSP430 these days.

  2. I’m sorry, but shouldn’t it be open source or maybe a Hackaday project?
    Using a wireless mic with all the Hacker RF noise you have at maker spaces and Maker faires is just asking for trouble unless you are using an adaptive frequency-hopping spread spectrum mic such as a bluetooth mic. I agree with the direct to media thought of [BrightBlueJim]. Easiest would be a Raspi with a Wolfson audio based audio board. While you are at it you could just as easily put together a good quality camera using a Raspi that would be better than the potato you are using.

  3. Hey Ben….Did you guys not make it to the Altium booth? Their new “Free Altium” AKA “Circuit-maker” is all the talk on the forums. Was looking forward to a video interview from maker fair from you guys. Ya know, just a major PCB cad software going free. (or not so free)???

  4. I’d second the idea of using wired wherever possible, then an independent portable recorder. Using an independent recorder and just clapping (or using a clapperboard if you want to be all Hollywood about it!) in sight of the camera and in range of the recorder’s mic makes syncing trivial later on.

    Otherwise, if you have to use wireless, I’m not aware of any digital systems that have a portable receiver at present. I’d keep an eye on Shure and Sennheiser in this space though. If you want to try the AV industry-standard products for this sort of application, I’d be looking at Sennheiser G3 or Shure UHF-R. But obviously if you’ve got RF noise in that space, they may still have issues.

    tl;dr: Invest in a field recorder, and optionally highly-directional microphones for it.

    1. Throwing another name on the wireless mic pile: Lectrosonics. Their UCR401 receivers work in a chunk of the 900 mhz spectrum, and they’re pretty good at picking signal from noise and interference. According to the site linked in the article, Azden’s hardware works on 170mhz.

      The only catch is, for a Lectro receiver and stick mic cube you’re looking at a couple grand. Add a lav mic and you’re over $2500. A go-big-or-go-home solution, but it’s industry standard broadcast quality hardware.

  5. The Azden system you are using operates on two frequencies in the VHF band. This band has the potential to get flooded with RF at large gatherings where lots of people may be using wireless audio. The Azden Pro series stuff works great for the price, but if you need a more flexible system you’ll have to spend some more money. They do make wireless systems that work on the UHF band, with hundreds of operating frequencies you can switch to, in case you do encounter interference on one frequency, you still have plenty of others. And they can be switched on the fly. Check out this: http://www.azden.com/products/wireless-systems/300-series-wireless-systems/310ht/

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