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#streamdeck

danie10@squeet.me
Danie

Bitfocus Companion is a Cross-Platform Open-Source app for the Elgato Stream Deck

Text as per post title with teal blie colour background with an image of a Stream Deck which is a black box with buttons on the front, arrange 5 buttons wide by 3 rows high.
Bitfocus Companion enables the reasonably priced Elgato Streamdeck and other controllers to be a professional shotbox surface for an increasing amount of different presentation switchers, video playback software and broadcast equipment. It has over 500 ready-to-use connectors to interface with numerous hardware devices (for presentations, music and video production work, cameras, etc) and for software services (YouTube, Twitch, Google Sheets, Zoom, OBS Studio, Slack, Home Assistant, etc).

In this video, I show how I’m using it for general gaming and productivity use at home. I show examples of how to start creating buttons, how to use delays and feedbacks, and some workarounds for auto-page changing (if you have a small deck), using global shortcut keys under Wayland and X11, opening an Obsidian Note, running OS updates, and more. I also show a workaround I use in gaming to hold a button to execute repairs whilst I do other things in the War Thunder game, like shooting back at the enemy.

My Stream Deck also works as a mini-dashboard for my Home Assistant to alert me of warning conditions for my solar system, home router, server, etc.

I spend some time too on the page I use for OBS Studio which has a button that visually shows the microphone recording level, zooming controls, warnings for microphone muted, etc.

The video is intended to give you a feeling of what this software can do and what its interface looks like. I also do a quick high-level comparison of how it compares to the StreamController software, which I did a video about a month or two back. In that video, I also showed how I use a Stream Deck to automate some spreadsheet functionality.

Watch youtube.com/watch?v=zakLajaUZY…
#Blog, #opensource, #productivity, #StreamDeck, #technology

danie10@squeet.me
Danie

Cheap DIY open-source button pad can do a lot of what an expensive Stream Deck does

Black box with a round black know that looks like a volume knob. On top of the box can be seen 20 coloured buttons in a grid of 4 wide and 5 high. The buttons have logos on that depic a fan, a headlight, warning triangle, battery, temperature gauge, etc.
This is going to be way cheaper than buying a Stream Deck, but it will certainly cost a bit of time and effort getting it together.

What it will do is allow for up to 8 different paper templates to be inserted with custom button logos (think of these templates as Stream Deck pages). The colour of each button can be changed, as well as switching between a press function or a toggle function. The button presses basically function as controller button presses or toggles.

What it is not going to do, though, is display any information back from the computer onto each button, or indicate any status back through a button, which a Stream Deck can do.

Besides that, though, it is great for having custom buttons set up for games to control lights, gears, AWD, horns, camera views, etc.

The video in the linked article does a good job of showing how it works.

See hackaday.com/2024/08/13/cheap-…
#Blog, #DIY, #opensource, #StreamDeck, #technology

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

How the Stream Deck rose from the ashes of a legendary keyboard

A computer keyboard showing on its left side showing two columns of 5 keys each with a small display under the key cap.
The keyboard was just a concept, dreamed up by Art Lebedev, a Russian design firm, and it was an ambitious idea at that: called the Optimus Maximus, it would require over 100 built-in screens using display technology that wasn’t readily available at the time. With all the excitement, the firm decided to make it real.

“You’re on a sinking ship, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do,” recalls Elgato’s Julian Fest, whose parents originally founded the company in 1999.

A very interesting read, and also a lesson in how imminently bankrupt companies can turn their whole game around by doing something different (think also of Netflix).

See theverge.com/c/features/241914…
#Blog, #change, #StreamDeck, #technology

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

StreamController Application on Linux for the Elgato Stream Deck

Teal colour background with white titling stating StreamController for Elgato Stream Deck. On teh right side is an image of a black Elgato Stream Deck with 15 buttons on it arranged in three rows.
StreamController is an elegant Linux application designed for the Elgato Stream Deck, offering advanced features like plug-ins and automatic page switching to enhance your streaming and productivity setup. It can support multiple Stream Decks together. A very useful feature is automatic page switching, which means you do not always need an available button on the deck’s main page to switch to other pages, as those pages can be activated automatically when the app becomes active.

I’m using StreamController to view and manage my Home Assistant application, Kdenlive, spreadsheet, Snowrunner and OpenBVE games, OBS Studio, and more. I demo this in the video and also show how buttons can be configured and used.

If you are a Windows user you may still find some of the use cases interesting to try out on the Elgato Windows software, and even if you don’t yet own a Stream Deck, the video may help motivate why you could find one very useful. For Linux users, this also inspires the confidence to buy an Elgato Stream Deck, as you can see the level and type of support available right now for Linux users.

Watch youtu.be/kIJOj_6Jimk
#Blog, #linux, #opensource, #streamcontroller, #StreamDeck, #technology

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danie10@squeet.me
Danie

StreamController is a brand-new open-source app for enabling and managing the Elgato Stream Deck on Linux

A settings screen for StreamController showing Layout, Background, Lables, and Actions options on the left side, for the button selected on the right side. On the right are a matrix of 3 by 5 buttons which represent the StreamDeck buttons showing icons for various apps and actions.
Many of us were using Stream Deck UI, which was a fork from a previous such app which was no longer being maintained. The devs decided to restart the initiative using a different coding language (Python), which would allow them to do a lot more.

So, what a surprise when I saw an announcement in the Discord chat that we should migrate to the new app called StreamController. Not only is it noticeably faster, but it also has support now for plugins, wallpapers, screensaver, as well as automatic page switching for Gnome and Hyprland (For example, you could see your favourite music albums when you open Spotify, your projects when you open VSCode, or your favorite websites in Firefox).

It is still in Beta and I installed the Flatpak version on Manjaro Linux, which is working just fine.

It has its own in-app Store for plugins and icon packs, so you are not installing these directly from Elgato. But there are already a number of useful plugins available such as Audio Control, Audio Switcher, Clocks, Counter Deck Controller, Gnome Window Calls, Media, OBS, OS, Pi-hole, HTTP requests, Speediest, Volume Mixer, and Weather.

Various of the plugins are supporting animation, so the OS one for CPU can display the live CPU percentage, or even show a graph that updates in the button display. The clock plugin will show the time as it updates. The volume level will show the volume percentage as it changes.

The OBS plugin correctly sends its button presses to the OBS app, when it is running with its standard server active. I was able to get all my main scenes working for zooming in around the screen, and to trigger the various hotkeys I have active inside OBS. There are still a few more features that likely need to be added to the OBS plugin.

There is only one icon pack right now in the store for Material Icons designed by Google (unofficial). But you can easily add Custom Assets such as your own JPG or PNG icons by just uploading them into the app. And of course, anyone else can contribute extra plugins and icon packs.

Overall, I’m really impressed with this app and can see why it needed a complete rewrite. It is already a lot of fun to use, so I’m looking forward to further enhancements over the coming months.

See core447.com/
#Blog, #linux, #opensource, #StreamDeck, #technology

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