I am on tour at the moment, so not much work on STATUS, however I thought I would share this box I have made to make life a bit easier.
The main goal was to output a LTC clock via HDMI so I can burn it in to recordings, however feature creep led it to include some audio meters, and then included some comms requirement. It is a bit particular to my setup, but I crossed some interesting bridges along the way.
Inputs – LTC, 2Wire, Left and Right program, Motorola Radio, USB sound (LTC left, program right). Tempreature probe x2. Headset mic input.
Outputs – HDMI (clock), Headphones, Headset, LTC.
Comms, radio and program are mixed via the knobs on the left into the headset/headphones.
The headset mic goes out to 2wire coms circuit or to the radio when the push to talk switches are pushed.
The LTC input is displayed on the clock, hitting CLK SRC flips the LTC input over to a rehearsal setup where the clock is input to the rig via the USB input, so you can take code from the show source during normal operation, or changeover to outputing from a laptop when in rehearsal mode. The LTC OK and FRAME skip lights indicate if the LTC is in spec. If you have an intermittent/quiet/loud input then the frame skip light goes crazy.
The DISP SRC button let you switch the reader element from USB or show source. I use the CLK SRC button in show situation to disengage the media servers from the LTC line – it flashes red which is a good clear indication.
Construction: Not for mass-production. There is a reason why there isn’t a picture of the inside. It contains half a mixer, a Behringer sound card, a StarTech sound card, two custom PCBs for connectors, signal switching and isolation (one with a uC on it to do the button and LED logic) a raspberryPi3 for LTC decoding and HDMI output. Some power supplies and a mic preamp. Quite allot to pack into a small space. If I were to make it again I would attempt to roll my own soundcard and mixer.