You used to need a lot of equipment to be a video DJ. Now you can do it all with a Raspberry Pi Zero and [cyberboy666]’s recurBOY. And if you missed out on the 1970’s video-editing psychedelia, now’s your chance to catch up – recurBOY is a modern video synth with all of the bells and whistles, and it’ll fit in your pocket. Check out [cyberboy666]’s demo video if you don’t yet know what you’re getting into. (Embedded below.)
RecurBOY has four modes: video, shader, effects, and external input, and each of these is significantly cooler than the previous. Video mode plays videos straight off of the SD card through the recurBOY’s composite video out. Shader mode lets you program your own shaders using the GLES shader dialect for resource-constrained devices. And this is where the various knobs and buttons come in. You can program the various shader routines to read any of the pots as input, allowing you to tweak the graphics demos on the fly.
Effects mode overlays your shaders on the video that’s playing, and external mode allows you to plug in a USB video capture card or a webcam so you can do all that same mangling with a live camera feed. And these two modes are where it gets awesome. The shader effects in the demo video cover all of the analog classics – including bloom and RGB separation – but also some distinctly digital effects. And again, you can tweak them all live with the knobs. Or plug in a MIDI controller and control it all externally. What hasn’t he thought of?
Old school analog video effects are really fun, and recurBOY brings them to you with the flexibility of modern shader coding. What’s not to love? If you want to see the pinnacle of the pre-digital era, that would be the Scanimate. For a video synth that integrates with your audio synth, check out Hypno. And if glitching the video is more your style, you can hijack the RAM of a VGA/composite converter.
Trippy, man!
via Adafruit.
I’m going to have to study this some once I get the PCB in so I can see how easy it will be to output HDMI. I have several uses for this, just not as analog.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t? I think all the video is done inside the Pi.
That’s what I was thinking but it seems to output through a composite RCA cable for whatever reason so I wasn’t sure. I’m willing to buy an adapter to be able to use HDMI because having the ability to program the shaders makes invaluable to some of my ideas…
On github it says it outputs “sd composite” but that seems to be just being passed through to the PCB so I’m betting there’s a setting that will output HDMI. I’ll definitely play with this because it has lots of possibilities and isn’t even 1/4 as expensive as “Hypno” and the like.
hello just finding this post now – was wondering why that video got many more views than my others lol.
to answer your question it can output hdmi – same as with most rpi’s if hdmi cable is plugged in on boot it will choose that otherwise falling back on cvbs. its set to output at sd resolution over hdmi tho – i dont think the pi-zero will handle too much at hd. but you can try :)
Awesome, thanks for responding. I just got my board in today and I’ll be ordering all the parts, etc. in the next few days. Can’t wait to get this thing running.