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92 Articles

A YouTube Subscriber Counter With A Tetris Twist

June 19, 2018 by 1 Comment

When it comes to YouTube subscriber counters, there’s not much wiggle room for creativity. Sure, you can go with Nixies or even more exotic displays, but in the end a counter is just a bunch of numbers.

But [Brian Lough] found a way to jazz things up with this Tetris-playing YouTube sub counter. For those of you not familiar with [Brian]’s channel, it’s really worth a watch. He tends toward long live-stream videos where he works on one project for a marathon session, and there’s a lot to learn from peeking over his virtual shoulder. This project stems from an earlier video, posted after the break, which itself was a condensation of several sessions hacking with the RGB matrix that would form the display for this project. He’s become enamored of the cheap and readily-available 64×32 pixel RGB displays, and borrowing an idea from Mc Lighting author [toblum], he decided that digits being assembled from falling Tetris blocks would be a nice twist. [Brian] had to port the Tetris-ifying code to Arduino before getting the ESP8266 to do the work of getting the subs and updating the display. We think the display looks great, and the fact that the library is open and available means that you too can add Tetris animations to your projects.

None of this is to say that more traditional sub counters can’t be cool too. From a minimalist display to keeping track of all your social media, good designs are everywhere. And adding a solid copper play button is a nice touch too.

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Robot Dances To The Beat Of New YouTube Subs

June 4, 2018 by 8 Comments

Sure, you could build some kind of numerical counter to keep track of new YouTube subscribers. But does an increasing digit display truly convey the importance of such an event? Of course not. What you need is something that recognizes this achievement for what it is and celebrates it with you. Something like Subby, the Interactive YouTube Subscriber Robot.

Whenever [brian brocken] gets a new subscriber, Subby’s little TV screen face lights up, and he either dances, salutes, or does another move within his impressive range of motion. [brian] wrote a Visual Basic app that searches his channel’s page for the subscriber count and sends it to the Nano’s COM port over serial every thousand milliseconds. [brian]’s got the VB app and all the STL files available on IO through Dropbox. Moonwalk past the break to watch Subby get down.

We like that Subby is too focused on celebrating each new subscriber to care about the total number itself. Maybe he could be programmed to do some extra special moves whenever the channel hits a milestone.

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Persistence Of Phosphorescence Clock Displays YouTube Stats Too

April 5, 2018 by 21 Comments

Looking for an eye-catching and unique way to display the time and date? Want the flexibility to add other critical information, like the number of YouTube subs you’ve got? Care to be able to read it from half a block away, at least at night? Then this scrolling glow-in-the-dark dot-matrix display could be right up your alley.

Building on his previous Morse code transcriber using a similar display, [Jan Derogee] took the concept and went big. The idea is to cover a PVC pipe with phosphorescent tape and rotate it past a row of 100 UV LEDs. The LEDs are turned on as the glow-in-the-dark surface passes over them, charging up a row of spots. The display is built up to two rows of 16 characters by the time it rotates into view, and the effect seems to last for quite a while. An ESP8266 takes care of driving the display and fetching NTP time and YouTube stats.

We’ve seen “persistence of phosphorescence” clocks before, but not as good looking and legible as this one. We like the approach, and we can’t help but think of other uses for glow-in-the-dark displays.

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High-Effort Streaming Remote For Low-Effort Bingeing

March 10, 2018 by 7 Comments

There’s no limit to the amount of work some people will put into avoiding work. For instance, why bother to get up from your YouTube-induced vegetative state to adjust the volume when you can design and build a remote to do it for you?

Loath to interrupt his PC streaming binge sessions, [miroslavus] decided to take matters into his own hands. When a commercially available wireless keyboard proved simultaneously overkill for the job and comically non-ergonomic, he decided to build a custom streaming remote. His recent microswitch encoder is prominently featured and provides scrolling control for volume and menu functions, and dedicated buttons are provided for play controls. The device reconfigures at the click of a switch to support Netflix, which like YouTube is controlled by sending keystrokes to the PC through a matching receiver. It’s a really thoughtful design, and we’re sure the effort [miroslavus] put into this will be well worth the dozens of calories it’ll save in the coming years.

A 3D-printed DIY remote is neat, but don’t forget that printing can also save a dog-chewed remote and win the Repairs You Can Print contest.

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Make Christmas Commercial Again With This Tiny TV Ornament

December 11, 2017 by 11 Comments

Readers of a certain age will remember a time when the Christmas season in the US officially kicked off after Thanksgiving. That was when advertisers began saturation bombing the communal mind with holiday-themed TV commercials night and day. Broadcast TV no longer holds sway like it did back then, and advertisers now start their onslaught in September, but you can put a little retro-commercialism back to Christmas with this 90s Christmas commercial-playing ornament for your tree.

The idea came to [SeanHodgins] after stumbling upon a collection of Christmas commercials from the 1990s on YouTube. With his content identified, he set about building a tree-worthy display from a Pi Zero W and a TFT LCD display. An audio amp and tiny speaker from an old tablet and a LiPo battery and charger form the guts of [Sean]’s TV, which were stuffed into a 3D-printed TV case, appropriately modeled after the TV from The Simpsons. The small fresnel lens that mimics the curved screens of yore is a nice touch. The software has some neat tricks, such as an HTTP server that accepts the slug of a YouTube video, fetches the MP4, and automatically plays it. We prefer our Christmas tree ornaments a little quieter, so a volume control would have been nice, but aside from that this looks like a ton of fun.

This isn’t [Sean]’s first foray into tricked-out ornaments, of course; readers might recall his IoT cheer-measuring Christmas ornaments from last season.

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Count YouTube Subscribers With This Red Play Button Award

December 2, 2017 by 5 Comments

Professional YouTubers live and die by the number of subscribers they have. It seems like a brutal way to make a living to us, but to each his own. Still, if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right, and keeping track of how you’re doing with this Play Button Award subscriber counter might make sense. Or it might drive you nuts.

YouTuber [ibuynewstuff] has reached the vaunted 100,000 subscriber mark, the number required to earn the Silver Play Button award. Sadly, 100k is the bare minimum needed to get YouTube’s attention, and tales of waiting for months for the award to arrive are not uncommon. [ibuynewstuff] worked around the issue by 3D-printing his own temporary play button badge. Mounted to a picture frame with an ESP8266 and an 8 x 80 LED display behind a diffuser, [ibuynewstuff] can keep track of his progress toward the Gold Play Button award at 1,000,000 subs. Hopefully, his Silver award will arrive before then.

Want to replicate this but would rather have something a little more permanent than a plastic play button? Try casting your own Copper Play Button award.

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Live Stream To YouTube By Pointing A Box And Pressing A Button

August 18, 2017 by 12 Comments

YouTube has the ability to do live streaming, but [Tinkernut] felt that the process could be much more straightforward. From this desire to streamline was born the Raspberry Pi based YouTube live streaming camera. It consists of a Raspberry Pi with some supporting hardware and it has one job: to make live streaming as simple as pointing a box and pressing a button. The hardware is mostly off-the-shelf, and once all the configuration is done the unit provides a simple touchscreen based interface to preview, broadcast live, and shut down. The only thing missing is a 3D printed enclosure, which [Tinkernut] says is in the works.

Getting all the software configured and working was surprisingly complex. Theoretically only a handful of software packages and functionality are needed, but there were all manner of gotchas and tweaks required to get everything to play nice and work correctly. Happily, [Tinkernut] has documented the entire process so others can benefit. The only thing the Pi is missing is a DIY onboard LED lighting and flash module.