Making a NDI Hotspot with Dicaffeine

 RasPi box that sends AND recieves NDI streams. I didn't believe it at first, but works damn well with minimal latency. 

Big ups to @TheKillerBeeRelayTeam for finding this, check out his website at www.hivemindsynthesis.com.

Also, check us out at the Hive Discord. Lot's of like minded synth-heads all helping each other out, myself included!

NOTE: All of this info is available and sourced from and on Dicaffeine's site for Raspian setup, just parsing it here for my Hive friends to understand some beginner things/not fully familar with RasPi setup! All rights reserved, I do not claim anything here as my own work, it's just what I had to do to get it working for me, and then hopefully them. If you are part of the Hive and you get stuck, DM me with where you are stuck and I will try to help you through.

I tested this with a RasPi 3 B+ with Bookworm 64-bit, and got some good results with it. I wouldn't recommend any lower. But you do you, boo. 

Get a 16+GB MicroSD card, plug it into your computer. Get the RasPi OS Imager and set that up, as you would.

Image your OS

Opening the Imager software, select your device. Like I said before, 3 B+ or higher for this.

   

The suggested OS, based on the Dicaffeine site, is Bookworm 64-bit, so you will need to find it in the legacy section of the setup. Scroll down till you get "Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy, 64-bit)".
All you need is the OS and Desktop enviroment. This would be a good time to get those settings it asks you for straightend out. Remember what you name it on hostname, it might help you later on finding it on the network. In this walkthrough, we are going to have "doughndi" as the RasPi's name, cause that's what I fucking named it. Tell it where you reside in time. Give it a username and password. Remember the username and password your setup here as well. In this walkthrough, we are going to have "djdoughy" as the username. Why? Cause that's what I fucking named it. And setting up the WiFi for it now would be benificial, and turn on SSH while you are at it.  Write that to the SDcard. Yes, this will take quite a few minutes, grab a beer/coffee/tea, and relax man. Chill out... Come back here when it's done.

Boot your Pie

Slap that MicroSD card into the pi, and power it on. It should be connected to a screen and keyboard/mouse by now, I hope. Let it boot to the desktop, and get connected to the internet. You set that WiFi up earlier, yeah? First boot's will take a bit, let it cook. Open the web browser, ONLY CLICK IT ONCE. Seriously, it will open, give it a break. You might get prompted with a keychain password? I don't know, I did. I just put a really simple password in, you don't need the browser but only for downloading 2 files. Get the Yuri2 and Dicaffeine downloads at the guys page directly, as it seemed to be the easiest to get to: 
https://dicaffeine.com/raspbian

A lot of things will not load on the chromium browser on RasPi's from my experience. I got the site to load after putting in the keychain password. If it doesn't work, perhaps updating the chromium would work? I'll note it later at bottom

Once those are in your Downloads folder, close that window out. Good time to run updates on the GUI, if you want. When you are done, reboot that bad boy.

Now if you are comfy doing the next part on the RasPi, open a terminal from the desktop and continue on after this next bit (Setting up Dicaffeine). Or, you can SSH into it and carefully copy and paste commands. Use PuTTY, or if you are on Windows, open PowerShell/Terminal. I used Terminal. At the prompt type ssh <the username you chose>@<the hostname you gave it> and push enter. Like so:

If it can't find the hostname, use the IP from the RasPi

Read the screen, type yes to accept the finger print, and then type the password you made eariler to log in.

The rest of this walkthrough will be done in the terminal, either through SSH or the terminal app on the pi.

Setting up Dicaffeine

Good time to maybe do some updates, I am not an expert at the RasPi by any means, but its always safe to update. The following command should be ran to update all the installed packages.

sudo apt update

Once that is done, give the pi a reboot

sudo reboot now

Once rebooted, open terminal,

At the prompt type this:

cd ~/Downloads

This puts us in the downloads folder where the packages from earlier should reside.

Were going to install the packages. The commands listed here are going to be 'generic' as the version numbers can change. Quick way to type these out is when you get to the file name, type the first few letters and push tab, it should auto fill the rest of the file name, then add the '-y' to auto accept the install. Run these seperatly, agree to any licenses after reading them. 

sudo apt install ./yuri2-2.8.0-xxx.deb -y
sudo apt install ./dicaffeine-xxx.deb -y

You might get some notices about issues (usually lil messages with a N: in front of them), but as long as it isn't throwing actual errors (E's or W's), they should install fine. The 2 things we installed was Yuri, a video processing framework, and Dicaffeine, which is the web interface and NDI host.

Speaking of NDI, now Dicaffine needs the libraries installed, run these 2 commands seperately. The dudes site said the second one was optional? I didn't get anything to work without it though, YMMV.

dicaffeine_get_ndi5 install aarch64-rpi4-linux-gnueabi
dicaffeine_get_ndi_hx install aarch64-rpi4-linux-gnueabi

Now we need to change the config of the RasPi itself so it can see audio. Open the RasPi config

sudo raspi-config

Navigate to "Advanced Options" then "Audio Config"

Change configuration to "PulseAudio". Navigate to finish and close the configuration. 

Next, we need to change something with the GUI interface. The following command will hide the 'taskbar' so the HDMI out will be full screen.

echo -e "autohide=true\nautohide_duration=500" >> ~/.config/wf-panel-pi.ini

Once that is done, plug a webcam in to test it here in a bit, then give the pi a reboot

sudo reboot now

And THAT should be it. Go to a computer on your network, type the "<hostname>/" in your browser and you should hopefully get the main page. "admin" is the default password. Poke around, have fun, if you break it, just start over!

Public Journal Entry : Last music stream

So this is being posted as of the day of my "last" music stream. I have had a plan to go on hiatus for a couple months now, at least partially. 

TL;DR I am abstaining from signing up for any music event/raid train for the forseen future.

Why? Mental health. Behold, my shame:

This was caused by and is currently causing my depression, at least partially (in the state of this world, you can probably guess the other parts, but alas this is something I can control). I kept putting it off because I would always tell myself "oh, you will take it apart and it won't be ready to play another set then cause you would put off putting it back together". Self-replicating deprecating nonsense. So I gave myself a cutoff. Today's Hive Mind Music is the end of this chapter. 

I am not going to rush this. 

I am not ending all of my streaming, I plan on keeping the daily/double-daily streams going. I love hanging out, chatting, gaming with all of my followers and subscibers. Y'all are the reason I haven't just moved on already. I love it here, but I want to feel better. I want these streams to be productive. 

I need a clean slate.

So, that's the story. The "studio" is going to get some pretty big upgrades. I won't ever fully quit music. It was one of my great escapes for a time, but now it feels like a burden. That needs to change, and I feel this is the change.

Thank you for reading this, thank you for being there. Till next time, tootles.

~doughy

StreamElements Overlay Chat - Top Down display!

 Okay, this seems silly to make a post like this, but I wish I had found a page that told me this before wasting a few hours trying to figure it out!

For a while, I have been wanting my chatbox overlay in OBS to display newest messages at top and move down. Googling the issue only brought me newbie posts of "How to put your chat on your OBS!" and "One Billion and One overlay designs!"

(What I had versus what I wanted)

Now, this might not be for everyone, but my chat is pretty slow on stream, and having it just a couple messages just appear in the middle of my screen off to the side was weird and just looked tacky. Having text appear at top, and get moved down and then fade out after a set time looked A LOT neater in my opinion.

Yeah, you can make your own custom chatbox by learning now to use the CSS and connections and what have you, but I like the layout and simplicity of StreamElements chat overlay feature (albeit, too simple somtimes). I have seen others with this type of layout, but its always been some other service, and I like to keep everything centralized to one service (that does emote walls, notifications,etc.), so it's always been a dead end.

So finally, I just sat down and dug into the CSS of the StreamElements chat preview and made some live edits to see what got me my results, and it boiled down to this:

.layout-column {
  flex-direction: column-reverse; }

That... That's it. Copy that into your chat overlay source in OBS under the Custom CSS feild, and it will display your chats starting at the top, and move the text down for each message.

I hope this post will help someone in the future who uses StreamElements chat overlay and wants text to appear at top and move down.