This is a good video if you are creating lots of things that are similar but not identical.
Category Archives: Hobbies
FreeCAD Beginner Video Series
We have created a beginner series of videos for FreeCAD. It’s great to be able to share our experience with the software and help others with their journey through Adventures in Creation
You can find the beginner series playlist on our YouTube channel at this link
Don’t forget to give us feedback once you have had a chance to review the videos.
MPCNC inlays
I am still working on creating a flawless inlay. I have found some wood that I can use but now I have to find a good subject. I am starting to get a feel for the type of graphic that would make a good inlay candidate.
Take a look at this page MPCNC vcarve inlay technique it should give you a good idea of where I am with this.
I have created some videos on the subject you can find them here YouTube video
Blender 2.8 Video Green Screen
Using Blender 2.8 it is possible to create a “green screen” video. Essentially you record a video in front of a green screen then superimpose that video over another background. To do this in Blender is fairly simple but you have to know what you are doing. It’s certainly not intuitive.
This picture shows the compositor window it’s important to understand that Blender has many different work benches in which you can manipulate “things” The compositor window allows us to take the source and apply nodes making it possible to filter out the green screen. This blog is just showing the very basic process of making a green screen video. It’s not intended to be perfect and much of the “tweaking” will depend on the final video used.
Here you can see three work benches are open the video editing, the rendering, and the compositing. You can switch between these work benches but for now it’s only necessary to use the compositing work bench. If the compositing work bench is not open, click on the + to the right and select compositing.
When you check the use nodes box (see previous picture) you will be presented with a rendering node and a composite node. You can delete the rendering node as we are not working a rendering as our source. To delete it, right click on the rendering node and select delete. Instead we are working with our green screen movie. Click add then input from the menu and insert a Movie Clip node. To place the node just move the mouse and left click in the position you want it to stay. It doesn’t really matter where you put it but input is usually left to right. At the bottom of the node you can see a file search box. Click that and select your green screen video. Of course at this point the green screen video is just something in front of a green screen that you can see, no magic has been applied.
Now add a keying node. You can find that under the Matte menu item. You will see that the keying node will allow you to select many different adjustment factors. More on this later.
Now connect the image output of the green screen movie clip node to the image input of the keying node. Don’t adjust anything yet, there are more nodes to add that will make the adjustment easier. 
Now add an Alpha Over node, you will find it under the color menu. Connect the image output of the keying node to lower image input of the Alpha Over node. You will see why later.
Finally add viewer node now connect the image out from the alpha over to the image input of both the composite node and the viewer node. This will show you the green screen picture in the background. You can adjust this image to make the green screen disappear. To start you will need to go back to the keying node.
Here you can see an item called Key Color. Click on the color and choose the color picker (pipet) and select a darker portion of the green screen in the video image. This will set the key color so that Blender will try to remove it. Now you can tweak all the settings in the keying node to try and make the green screen disappear. – You should wait for the change to render before you try another tweak. Eventually you may add other nodes to assist with removing the green screen but for now, let’s keep it very simple. Once you have the green screen removed (in my example it’s not quite gone but I don’t want to be perfect here just get the principle worked out.
Now we can add a second movie clip node, this will be our background. It can be a static image or another video. The choice is yours. Once you have added the node use the file selector to insert the media you want to use. Make sure that it is large enough to fill the background. If it is not adjust it before you use it.
Once you have the media loaded in the second movie clip node just connect the output of that movie clip node directly to the upper image input of the Alpha Over node. This should put your image in the background.
Before you render the video you need to make sure you have everything set up properly. The output should look like the picture above. Select an output folder and ensure you have ffmpeg video selected or it will just render frames. Select RGB for color output and an MPEG4 container. Make sure your end Frame is the end of the video you want, too short and you won’t get it all, too long and you will have a lot of black. 
And finally, and most importantly. Blender will by default render the sequencer (video editing work bench) you need to select just compositing in the post processing. Then just render the animation. I normally render the image first just to make sure it’s rendering what you want to see. Rendering takes a while, go get a drink and come back later and you should have a video in the output folder that you selected. You can take that video into the video editing work bench and manipulate it like any other video.
NOTES:
If you want to use a box matte to remove areas of the video that are not on the green screen. Ensure you connect to the garbage input on the keying node. The box matte node should connect right after the movie clip node and before the keying node.
Home Automation
As you may have seen I have the Amazon Echo at home. I liked the potential to make the echo the hub for home automation. The first step is to get something you can control so I set out to find something that works with Alexa natively so there would be no issues with integration. I searched Amazon for the a switchable plug that I could plug my living room light in to. I found the TP-LINK HS100.
This is a wifi enabled smart plug. You plug it in and from an Android app set it up on your wi-fi network. Once it’s set up you just ask Alexa to look for new devices and it will find the smart plug. Through the set up you designate a name for the device so now you can say something like “Alexa turn on the living room light” and it will switch it on and say “OK”. This is cool and how I work my living room light today. Of course the light is just one thing you can turn any item on that is plugged in to the smart plug. It is just a simple way to power on and power off. This is the beginning of automating the home of course, the smart plug is about $30 so this could be an expensive way to avoid turning a light switch. I will admit that I got mine a lot cheaper than that, it was on sale and I had a gift card from a survey so I ended up paying about $4 out of pocket. Since we have had that light operated by Alexa we have wished that we had one for the bedroom light so that it would be on when we go upstairs. Now imagine, instead of saying “Alexa turn off the living room light” at the end of the day we could say “Alexa its bed time” and have her turn off the living room light, turn off the tv and the tuner, turn on the bedroom light, set the alarm, check the garage door is closed, and start the sounds of the sea music. – Well, this is possible if you introduce something like Openhab. What is this you ask, here’s a brief description of Openhab
The Amazon Echo
I saw the Amazon Echo online and thought that it looked like a cool device, it’s essentially a smart blue tooth speaker. How is it smart you ask? Well, it can understand some of your spoken questions/commands. Take a look at the Amazon page here Amazon Echo
Or simply search for Echo on Amazon.com – I was intrigued by the capability and wanted to see how hard it was to build an “Alexa” skill so I researched a little and it turns out that you build a skill from a template. Although that sounds simple, it’s anything but simple. There are several parts to the creation and publishing. I decided to create one that could provide some car insurance facts. The template gives you all the code that you need you just need to carefully follow the instructions and replace the key words and facts with the data you want to share. Having done that I was able to successfully publish my first Alexa skill and it is now available from the ever growing skills library on Alexa.
You can ask Alexa things like, “what’s the weather today?” or “give me an update” and it will give you whatever it can. You can also ask it to add things to your shopping list which can see on your phone when you are at the store. It’s very cool that way. Where it really falls down is it’s not linked to a regular search engine so if you ask it something that you think Google can answer you may stump Alexa! It is improving daily, there are more “skills” being added daily. I am very interested to see where this technology goes. I suspect that Amazon is going to integrate Alexa into many other devices.
One of the other cool features of Amazon Echo involves home automation. You can use “Alexa” to automate things at home check out my page on home automation.
Cool Guitars
Going to work on a new project Albatross DIY Guitar it’s a Les Paul style that needs to be built from the kit. I will start out by selecting a finish for the guitar then working on that, once I have the finish I will work on the body. Then, I will decide what the headstock shape should look like. I will fashion the headstock to that shape then finish that too. Once I have completed all the preliminary finishing I will assemble the guitar and put all the pieces together.
So here’s my kit before we get started. There are pictures of everything in the box (note, no instructions whatsoever!)
This is the box with all the parts in it. I looked at the body and there are definitely some areas that need some filler. I am going to research the best way to fill it. Obviously if I use some filler I can’t use stain to color the body as the filled areas will show up like sore thumb.
This is the back of it, you can clearly see that we do not have a one piece solid body but, keep in mind you can’t expect a $2,000 guitar. This is a cheap kit and so far looks like a good kit as long as you keep your expectations in check.
This is a little closer on the body. I like the look of it even though it’s a very thin veneer. I tried a few of the pieces together and they seem to fit reasonably well. I like what they have done so far but on the right hand side where the neck meets the body the binding is sticking up above the body and interfering with the neck. I need to file that down to prevent it from interfering with the neck position.
Line6 Amplifi FX100
AMPLIFi FX100
Just received a Line6 Amplifi FX100 as a gift, it’s a multi-effects pedal on steroids. – It has man built in AMPs and Cabinets plus all the pedals I could possibly want/need. It is a piece of hardware that has a bluetooth connection to and Android or iOS device.
I am using it with my Nexus7 and setting up the FX100 so I can play Rocksmith songs and use the pedal to play the tones that I need to sound like the song. – I have already created a couple of custom tones based on the Rocksmith tones, they are pretty analogous if you use your judgement to select similar amp, cabinet and pedals. There are some things you need to know to get the FX100 working and the documentation is pretty sparse but once you figure out the basics it’s lots of fun.
I will work on documenting some of it here when I get the time but for now, I think it’s very cool.
One of the ideas I had is to use the FX100 to find a tone for the CDLC I am creating then use that a basis to create a new custom tone for my own CDLC. It should be fun to try. – I just wish I had more time to do that.
I was able to set up a few tones, load them on the hardware and the navigate using the foot switches to the bank (25) that has my tones in it then navigate through the tones using foot switch A through D. It works pretty well, if you have the Nexus on the screen showing that bank, clicking the foot switch will change the current tone on the Nexus, it’s pretty slick. I have already uploaded one tone to the Line 6 tone cloud and expect to get a little more prolific with that.
Screen shots helping to create CDLC for Rocksmith2014
To create a new song there are many steps to take, the order of things is important to get a working song:
- Open Editor On Fire (EOF) and click file/new to start a new song.
It will prompt you to pick your music file (usually an mp3 file) Remember that you can make an mp3 from a YouTube video if you are hunting for a music track.
- There will be a dialog that asks you some music information fill in the appropriate fields.
- Once you have the song loaded you will see this screen. Of course you can’t see your song wave yet because you haven’t switched it on.
- Select song/waveform graph/show
- Now add a leading silence to the song before you start modifying anything. You need this so the song doesn’t start too quickly in Rocksmith.
- About 3 seconds will do the trick. The EOF will update the ogg file to add the silence.
- Now under beat update the bpm. If you don’t know the bpm you have to figure it out. This is critical to getting the timing right. If you don’t have the right bpm your song tab won’t line up.
- Now we need to set the track to which track we are creating. You can use part real_guitar for the lead or the rhythm you just have to keep track of what you assign where. If you don’t select part real_guitar or real_guitar_22 you may not be able to modify Rocksmith specific features. Also, you won’t be able to import the guitar pro tab.
- From the file menu you can import the guitar pro tab (Guitar Pro Import)
- Select your guitar pro tab for the song. If you don’t have the tab you are going to need it or you will be entering all the notes manually. You can edit and create guitar pro 5 tab in Tux Guitar. It will allow you to play the tune and hear how the tab will sound. Remember that all of the component parts are very important. If your song doesn’t play the exact tab you have selected then you will have to modify to make it work in Rocksmith2014.
- When you import the guitar pro file it will ask you if you want to use the time signature and other setting from the guitar pro file, it is up to you. Do what is best for the final outcome.
- When you import you may have multiple tracks in the file. You can import the one that you want for this track, you can always import the others later. (The one in the picture only has one track “Guitar” so that’s what was imported).
- Once you have imported it, you will see the notes from the tab and the wave form together. It’s obvious from this that the notes start too early in the file. To change that you can drag the beat marker to the beginning of the wave form.
- Once you do this, if (a big if) all the notes line up with the music in the wave form, you are in great shape. Chances are they won’t and you will have to do lots of manual manipulation to the file in EOF. Take your time here as the final outcome will only be as good as your EOF file and its timing, song to notes and how they play. You can review the notes in EOF an see how they line up whilst you listen to the music in the wave form.
- As you advance the music, you will see the notes in the 3D view lining up with the timing markers. You can check to see if the notes are going to be presented at the exact time that you they should be played. Remember in EOF you can fine tune the tab by adding, removing and adjusting individual notes and chords.
- Once you have lined everything up you can import your lyric file, this will display the lyrics in time with the music. If you don’t have an lrc file you will need to make one. It’s quite time consuming to line up the words with their timing markers but it will make a much better final product if you do it. You can use UltraStar Creator to create a lrc file that will work with EOF.
- Now you have your file set up, you can add sections to break it up in Rocksmith and allow the dynamic difficulty to be added later. Just try to break the song into sections that make sense. Intro, Verse, Chorus, Outro etc. These are going to be important for riff repeater use too.
- Finally, save the file and open up wwise so you can make the ogg vorbis files and the wem that you will need to create the usable psarc file.
- Click on new to start a new project in Wwise. Once you have filled in all the required boxes you will have created some project files in it’s own Wwise folder.
- Right click on the Default work unit and select Import Audio Files….
- Select the happy birthday files from EOF then click on source setting on the right hand side of the screen.
Click on Override parent then select Factory Conversion Settings/Vorbis/Vorbis High Qualtity. Then select Edit…
- Make sure you have selected stereo then click Edit… here.
- Change the seek table granularity to 16384 and click OK
- Click convert and it will create the Ogg Vorbis file that you need. Do this same process for the song preview that you created in EOF. That will give you the files that you need to make the psarc with the Rocksmith Creator Toolkit.
- In the creator you are going to create your Dynamic Difficulty first, this will create new xml files that you need. Select the DDC tab and click Add.
- Add your guitar part xml file. This is the xml file you created in EOF.
- Now select ddc_8_max_levels under options. Set the phrase length to 4 and click Generate DD. This will make a new XML file that DD in the name. It contains the information required for Rocksmith to use dynamic difficulty.
- Now in Platform make sure you have only selected the platforms you want to create. In my case just PC. Then fill out the information for the song you are creating. Select a song in the drop down box that you already own the DLC for. It can be any song as long as you own it already.
- Under files select the wem button to choose your wem file that you created with Wwise.
- You can select the file you want then when you create the song it will ask you about the preview file too.
- Select the album art that you have for your song. If you don’t have something, you can go on google and under images select something that has exact size 512×512. This will give you the best result.
- Double check you have everything filled in correctly and that your game version is RS2014
- Under the arrangements click add. In the pop up box you can select the XML file for the arrangement you are adding.
- Select the DDC_Part which is the XML with the dynamic difficulty in it.
- Here is where you can select Lead or Rhythm as the arrangement. You can also select the appropriate tones. If you have your own or you just want to use one from another song.
- Do the same thing for the vocals then, click generate. It will ask you where you want to save the psarc file. Once you have the psarc file (for the appropriate platform) you can copy it to your Rocksmith DLC folder. It is in c:\windows\Program Files(x86)\Steam\Steamapps\Rocksmith2014\dlc folder.
Start Rocksmith and your new song should appear in the appropriate area (Lead, Rhythm etc). You should be able to play the song, see the dynamic difficult and enjoy!
Rocksmith DLC
Update: It appears that the folks at customsforge have come up with something that really works, it’s called the Customs Forge Song Manager (CFSM) it will go through your DLC and catalog it by name and artist. It can also export the list to a spreadsheet. – I have downloaded it and it works pretty well.
I am looking for a good way to catalogue 📇 the songs I have, so far, there appears to be no good way to do that. This may be a good project for the future. I wonder if you can find the artist and track name from the song file itself. That might be worth investigation.