What were the best videos of 2017 here at the House of Hacks? Today Harley looks at this year's top 5 videos, talks about what worked and what didn't and plans for 2018.
Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Transcript
Today at the House of Hacks, I was looking at the channel analytics and...
[Intro]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.
Today's a wrap up of 2017 here at the House of Hacks. I'm going to count down the top five videos, take a brief look at some of the analytics and touch on what I'm thinking of for 2018.
But first, I want to give a great big, huge "Thank You!" to everybody who watched, liked, shared and subscribed to this year. It really means a lot to know that what I shared, you found helpful or encouraging in some way.
Links to all the top five videos can be found either up here in the cards or down below in the description.
Number five was an unboxing video for a seven foot long, wall mounted boom arm that's used in photography studios. My buddy Rich got this for his studio to mount lights or cameras on. I did a second video to make an adjustable, wall-mounted bracket for it.
Video number four was about hanging a mirror on the wall with French cleats. These are handy for hanging things that you want to easily reconfigure or large or heavy objects, like TVs or pictures.
And I want to say this year was a record breaking year for the number of videos. I posted more videos this year than all the years previously combined on this channel.
And this is mainly due to participating in Vlog Every Day in August. VEDA accounted for 31 videos just by itself. One thing I learned from the VEDA videos was videos talking about making things aren't as popular as videos actually making things.
Video number three was another unboxing video. This time it was the Canon 77D that I got the first day it was released. By posting that video on the first day it was released, I was able to catch the trending wave from the new release.
Reviewing the channel analytics for the year, one number really blew my mind. There were over a million minutes of House of Hacks videos watched this year. I never would have imagined that kind of response five years ago when I first started this channel and I am truly humbled. Again, I want to say a great big "Thank you!"
The number two video was about converting fluorescent lamps to LEDs using a ballast bypass method. This was the second in a series of videos about converting fluorescent tubes to LEDs. I have plans for a couple other LED lighting videos and looking forward into 2018, I have a huge number of ideas. Unfortunately, way more ideas than I have time for.
There's the last two videos of the Bits of Binary series as well as a Boolean series that I'd like to do. These two series I know aren't terribly popular, there's not a lot of search for them on YouTube. But they are very foundational for a third series that I have an idea for... talking about the very foundations of modern computers.
There are a bunch of Contraption Dissection videos that I want to do, taking things apart, looking at how they work and scavenging materials for future projects. There's project videos for making new things. Repair videos for fixing things. Photography technique videos and other things that I haven't even thought of yet.
If there's anything in particular that you'd like me to cover or go more in-depth in, leave a comment below. I read all the comments and try to respond to all of them.
And if you haven't already, subscribe and click the bell notification icon and YouTube will notify you whenever there's new videos posted.
And the number one video was a collaboration one I did with Mike over at Tomahawk DIY where I talked about the why and how of using dielectric grease in connections in your car. Check out his channel in the link below.
Thanks for joining me on our creative journey here in 2017.
Inexpensive temperature controlled soldering stations are a great upgrade to an entry-level pencil soldering iron. In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley does a quick review of his Aoyue 937+ soldering station that he’s used for a number of years. The Aoyue 937+ is a good type of soldering iron for circuit boards and what he uses for electronics.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Transcript
Want to replace your pencil soldering iron something else?
Today at the House of Hacks, we talk about one of your options for an inexpensive digital temperature controlled soldering station.
[Intro]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-youselfers. Harley here.
For years and years, I used a pencil type soldering iron. In fact I started with one of these and I used one up until about six years ago. These are really inexpensive. They're usually less than $10 and they just plug right into an outlet. There's nothing in between. The cord goes directly into the soldering iron and the resistance inside the soldering iron is what controls the temperature. They're not the best things around but they get the job done. And like I said, I used these almost my whole life now.
About six years ago I picked up an inexpensive soldering station off of Amazon for about $60 and I've been really pleased with it. About 30 years ago, I used a Weller on the job briefly and really, really liked it. But it was a $300 dollar soldering station. I'm guessing. It was somewhere in that neighborhood. So, it was significantly more expensive than what I was using. And for hobbyist use it was more than I wanted to afford.
But about six years ago I picked up an inexpensive temperature controlled digital soldering station off of Amazon. And I've really enjoyed it. It works really well for hobbyist use around the workshop and it's been my "go to" iron for now the last six years or so.
So, let's take a look at some of the features that it has and just explore it a little bit.
I have no idea how to pronounce this manufacturer. It's five vowels. But it's the 937+ and it's digitally controlled.
It comes with this control unit, a power cord, the soldering iron itself, a sponge for wiping the tip off and a little holder to keep the hot soldering iron in and to hold the sponge.
You can also put a roll of solder on here, and somewhere in the shop I have a little dowel thingy that holds the solder in here. But personally I don't like putting the solder on there. It's a little bit cumbersome and the rolls don't really fit on there very well. It's hard to get the solder out when you're trying to use it. So I just leave the solder loose.
One of the nice things about this unit is the tips on it are interchangeable. They have a number of different designs for different types of applications. And the way you change it is you just loosen this little knurl and this heat shield comes off and the tip just slides on. And here inside we can see the ceramic element that is the heating element. And you can get all kinds of different tips for this. This one is a small sharp tip that works really well for general electronics use. It's large enough to work for most applications but small enough that you can get in on PCBs and stuff. They also have things like chisel and angled tips and a number of different styles depending on your application.
You have the power switch on the front that turns it on and you have a digital display that shows the current temperature.
So it kind of has two modes depending on what it's doing. Normally it shows the current temperature. But if you press the up and down buttons, it shows the temperature that you're setting it to. And when you let it go, after a couple seconds, it reverts back to the current temperature of the soldering iron.
It takes 30 to 60 seconds to initially come up to temperature. Once it's at temperature, it holds the temperature really well. I've not had a problem with it dropping temperature. It always keeps it right spot on what you set it for.
It'll go all the way up to 480 and this is Celsius, so it's 800 and something, almost 900 degrees Fahrenheit. And it goes down to 200, I believe, is the lowest it'll go. So you can set it in 1 degree Celsius increments anywhere between those two ranges.
One thing I don't like about it is this base. It's pretty lightweight and moves around pretty easily and also the soldering iron is kind of touchy in terms of how it fits in there. It's easy for it to not get in there quite right. And so I'm not a bit fan of this little base thing. I use it sometimes. A lot of times I'm using this Panavise for my projects and it has its own soldering iron holder and if I'm using this I just use that instead. It's a whole lot more convenient. It works really well.
So it's a real basic simple unit. It gets the job done really well. Like I said, it's about $60. I'll leave a link to it down in the description below if you're interested in this particular model. Check out Amazon for this and other competitors.
If you're a subscriber here at House of Hacks, I want to thank you for joining me on a regular basis on this continuing creative journey that we're on.
And if you're new to House of Hacks, I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark that sometimes manifests in making things with a mechanical or technical bent to them. And I hope to inspire, educate and encourage these types of makers in their wood working, metal working, electronics, photography and other similar endeavors.
If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you again in the next video.
Thanks again for joining me on this creative journey we're on.
Harley reviews the Canon 77D and gives his first impressions after having his hands on it for five months. This includes a brief comparison between the Canon 77D and 80D. This is a subjective review and not an in-depth scientific analysis and comparison of the 77D vs 80D.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Transcript
After five months of owning it, today at the House of Hacks I want to give a quick hands-on review of the Canon 77D and give my first impressions of it.
[Intro]
Hi Makers, Builders and Photographers. Harley here.
As I mentioned in the intro, about five months ago I got a new Canon 77D on the first day that it came out. I did an unboxing of that. If you want to see what it looks like coming out of the box, you can take a look at the card here or link down in the description below.
I won't be actually showing the camera today since I'm using it to record. But I do want to talk about some of the pros and cons that I found with it. Things that I've like and things I didn't like and also do a little bit of comparison between the 77D and the 80D in terms of features, because they're pretty similar in a lot of respects.
There's a lot of similarities between the 77D, the T7i and the 80D. It really does fall right in between the two of them, both price wise and feature wise. So I want to talk a little bit about that today. I don't want to compare it to the T7i, it's really pretty close in a lot of ways. Really the only difference is it has a few more buttons and it has an information panel on the top of the camera rather than completely relying on the LCD on the back. So, it's a little bit more "pro" but not as "pro" as the 80D.
So the real comparison I wanted to do today is with the 80D. All the numbers I'm throwing out here today are as of August 2017 and are for "body only." I'm not including any lens kits because those can kind of change the prices somewhat. So it's just the "body only" I'm going to be using for price comparison on.
The 77D is about $300 less expensive than the 80D. The interesting thing is that both have the same sensor in them. The 77D does have a newer computer in it and with that newer computer come some additional functionality. The 77D's ISO does have one more stop than the 80D and I think this is primarily because the processor in it can do more noise reduction and things of this nature. Like I said, the sensor is the same, so it's purely a difference in the way it can process the information with the faster computer.
That said, the 77D does have one less stop on the shutter speed. It only goes to 1/4000th of a second whereas the 80D goes to 1/8000th of a second. Also, the 80D's sync speed is 1/250th of a second instead of 1/200th of a second for the 77D.
The 77D's viewfinder, that you look through the back on, covers less surface area of the sensor than the 80D. The 80D covers 100% whereas the 77D only covers [95%]. So it works well for focusing and composition, but it doesn't give you the full range all the way out to the outer edges.
On drive mode, the 77D only shoots 6 frames per second as compared to the 80D's 7 frames per second. So it's one frame a second less but on the other hand the faster processor allows it to save that as fast as it shoots it whereas the 80D has a buffer that fills up eventually. So you can shoot all day on drive mode with the 77D whereas the 80D eventually will fill up and will stop taking pictures. This is only if you're shooting JPEG. If you're shooting RAW, they'll both fill up right around 25 frames.
If audio is a concern for you, the 77D does not have a headphone jack to monitor audio with whereas the 80D does.
The 77D also has a lower battery life than the 80D when taking stills. I'm not sure how it compares when shooting video.
The 80D is designed as a lower level pro camera, so it does have some additional features that aren't found on the 77D. Notably, it has an optional battery grip so you can get more battery life out of it. It has weather sealing so you don't have to worry about rain quite so much. It has more buttons to get direct access to certain features and it has more features built into the firmware for finer control of some of the features like auto-focus and micro-adjustments on lenses.
Some of the things I like about the 77D personally, coming from having shot with a 5D mark II previously... It has much better battery life than the 5D did. It does have less battery life than the 80D, but compared to the 5D it's much, much better on batteries. On the 5D I have a system where I can plug the camera into line power so I don't have to run off batteries because it runs through batteries so quickly. The 77D, I haven't had that problem with. I've always run batteries. I am thinking about getting an adapter, just on general principles, but I don't feel like I have a pressing need for it.
Another feature that I really, really like is when you hit the 4 gigabyte maximum file size, the 5D just stops recording. So you have no warning when it's run out of file space and stopped recording. It just stops. Whereas the 77D when it fills up a file, it just automatically creates a new file and continues going. Now it does only do this for 30 minutes. There is a 29 minute, 59 second cut-off that's mandated by some European legal standard somewhere. I'm not quite sure of all the details so this is a common limitation across all DSLR and mirrorless cameras that sell on the international markets. It's not a technical limitation. It's strictly to conform to a certain regulations. And the 77D does give you audible and visual feedback when it hits that limit. It displays a message on the screen and also the mirror pops up so you can actually hear it when it stops recording.
The 77D has an articulating screen and I love this feature. On the 5D mark II, the screen is fixed on the back and it was always a pain to try to focus and frame, particularly shooting solo with my videos. With the articulating screen on the 77D, it's a wonderful, wonderful feature.
And speaking of the screen, it's touch sensitive. This is really cool because you can direct touch on it to activate features and change options on it rather than have to use buttons and scrolling through menus. I really love the touch screen. Also, you can use it to zoom on your photos and move, pan around, as you're reviewing photos. It's awesome.
One cool feature that was kind of a surprise, kind of a sleeper feature, is if you don't have the battery in, the viewfinder as you're looking through it is really dim. It's some sort of mechanical overlay system where if the battery's not physically in and the door's not shut, then the viewfinder display is kind of a grey. You can kind of see through it, but it's very definite that there's a problem there. Just kind of a reminder of "oh, I don't have a battery in," I need to put one in and get the door closed.
Another cool feature about this that's common to I think all new cameras, is the wi-fi connectivity. You can control it from the phone or from a tablet, something like that, as long as you have an app for it, and this is a really cool feature. I need to use it more. I kind of forget about it at times and it would really make things a lot easier I think.
The 77D also has Bluetooth and NFC communications. I've personally never used those yet.
And finally, I want to talk a little bit about the auto-focus. It is really smooth. It works really, really well. I had it out shooting some video, just outside playing around, and as the subject moved through the frame, it would follow it. And if the subject moved out of frame and a new subject came into frame, it would just kind of nicely glide to the new subject and pick it up. Auto-focus worked really well, particularly compared to the old 5D system which was known for not being great on it's auto-focus.
And the other thing about the auto-focus is it has face detection. And that face detection is spot on. It works really, really, really well.
Ok, let's talk about the things I don't like. And this is a much, much smaller list.
The first thing really isn't the fault of the camera so much as the lens. Talking about auto-focus. I'm using a 24-105 L lens and it is really loud when it focuses. It makes the audio that's recorded on the camera completely unusable. You can use it for syncing to, but you definitely wouldn't want to use it in your video if auto focus is being used. Of course, you can put it in manual focus and you wouldn't have that issue.
Another thing that I really don't like about it is the CR2 format for this camera is unique to this camera. And so my older software that I use requires an upgrade and in order to get the upgrade, I have to pay money and you know... it'd be nice if, and this is kind of a pet peeve of mine is... file formats should stay the same. Let's design a file format so that raw files can be saved and not have to have new formats internally every time a new sensor is developed. I'm not quite sure why they can't come up with a file format that's parameterized such that when a new sensor comes out, just the parameters can change but the format can stay the same and that give you backward compatibility on all the old software. I mean I understand from possibly a business standpoint, but from an end user satisfaction standpoint, it's really, really annoying that files are not forwardly compatible.
OK. I'll get off my soapbox now.
OK. And the last thing that is kind of a downer about this, and again this is almost a soapbox kind of issue, is I'm not sure why, in this day and age, Canon can't put 4K video in all their SLRs. I mean we have point and shoots with 4K video. Our phones have 4K video in them. Why can't, on a $1000 camera, we have 4K video?
In fact earlier today I saw and was handling a Panasonic GH5 and the owner had the same lens on it that I have right now on my Canon, the 24-105 L glass. He was using an adapter to use that glass with that body. So, I don't know, I may be looking at other camera systems for my next body. The Fuji X-T20 has adapters that will work with the Canon lenses, so I'm going to be seriously looking at that. One of the reasons I got this camera was because I'm heavily invested in the Canon ecosystem and I didn't want to change systems at this point in time. But given that Canon's reticence about getting into 4K and the extra flexibility you have shooting 4K, my next camera purchase may not be a Canon even though I may still continue to use Canon lenses.
And I want to talk about two other points someone else has brought up in a review that I read.
One is that the LCD screen can be kind of dim if you're out in bright sunlight. Personally, I've never shot out in bright sunlight, so I haven't really run into this problem. But it is a consideration if you're thinking about one of these cameras.
And second, while this sensor was a big step up from some of Canon's previous offerings, it's still not as good as some of the competition. Particularly Sony and Fuji, they're using the same sensor, are just really killing the rest of the competition in terms of dynamic range of the sensor. And Canon just doesn't quite live up to the competition in this regard. So if you're shooting in high-dynamic range situations, where you want to capture a lot of detail over a broad spectrum, this may not necessarily be the camera for you.
One thing that was a big surprise for me was I use highlight alert. And I'm used to going into them menu system and turning this on. And I went through the menu system when I got this camera and I couldn't find it. I was kind of surprised that it wasn't there because my old XTi has highlight alert on it. So I was surprised it wasn't included as an option. But then I started reading through the manual about it and it is an option... well... it's not an option... it's always on. You can't turn it off. Which for me is just fine. I never want it turned off. But if highlight alert is something that you find distracting, just be aware you can't turn it off. It's always on.
And that's pretty much it for this quick review.
Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we're all on. I hope you enjoyed this and find this review helpful.
A Logitech C922x Pro is unboxed and tested in this episode of House of Hacks. Harley shows everything that's in the box as well as a test and mini-review comparing the Logitech C922x Pro stream webcam with built-in iSight camera on the Mac Book Pro.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Transcript
Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to unbox a new Logitech C922x web camera.
[Intro music]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.
Today I'm in the beautiful Pacific north-west, outside the workshop on a trip.
The day before I left on vacation I received this in the mail.
It's a new webstream camera and I just wanted to unbox it today.
This is going to be kind of a first look. After the unboxing, we'll go do a screen shot and see how it looks on the computer and hopefully it'll be working pretty well here.
It did get a little wet. The box is a little messed up. One of our iceboxes leaked in the car, but everything... it should be OK. It'll be fine.
So, we've got a six month premium license for XSplit that came with it. I probably won't be using this. I'm planning on using OBS with this, so... It comes with XSplit trial license and the standard "don't leave this out in the sun," "don't use it in a wet environment" kind of disclaimer product stuff that all the lawyers require.
It comes nicely wrapped in some plastic here. And not much to it. It has a USB cable built in. It's built-in, wired directly in, you can't remove the USB cable. It looks like it's a pretty long cable. And then it has some plastic wrapping things up. I'll take that off the front. And, not sure... it looks like this plastic has some sort of adhesive on it but it also looks like it's a plastic bag, so I'm not quite sure, have to figure that out. Another piece of plastic protecting the plastic. I'll just rip this off. There we go. And...
Oh, it's got a 1/4-20 hole in the bottom to mount this on. And some more plastic, remove before flight. And it looks like it has some sort of stand. I'm not sure how this is supposed to work yet. I've seen people mount this. It's got some plastic, rubber protective parts in here. I think it's supposed to mount on top of the monitor somehow. I'm not quite sure, I haven't figure that out yet. But it does sit on the base like this, if you want to sit it on a desk. Since it has the 1/4-20 mounting bracket, I'll probably use it with a Gorillapod in most of my applications.
And the cable... let's see how long this cable is. It looks like it's not short. Probably about 6 feet or so, so long enough to plug into a laptop. It might be a little short for a desktop environment if you have it underneath a desk or something like that, you might need an extension cable.
But that's really all there is in the box. Not much to it. So let's go throw it on the computer and see what kind of image quality we get.
OK. Here I have the two camera's setup side-by-side. The right side is the iSight built into the Mac. The image on the left is coming from the Logitech.
The way I have this setup is the iSight image is native size from the camera in the vertical height, it's cropped a little bit on the width to fit the frames side-by-side. The image on the left coming from the Logitech is scaled down a little bit to get the sizes the same so you can kind of see side-by-side in terms of size comparison how they compare.
You can see over... oops... over here... notice in particular the noise difference between the two in these details. The noise coming from the webcam is just horrible. We are in a really bad lighting situation. This is at night and lit by one table lamp and so we've got really poor light here which really exacerbates the differences between the cameras.
The webcam does seem to have a little bit more saturation and a little bit warmer than the Logitech, but the Logitech has much more dynamic range. The brights aren't quite so blown out, the darks have a little bit more detail in them.
Let's go look at these images full screen so we kind of get a better look at the detail on them.
First we go to the web-camera, here we have the web-camera is now expanded for 1080 height. Since it's not a high def camera it does have the black bars on the side and it is kind of above its native resolution. But this is kind of the application that I would have for it. I'd want to post things on YouTube in high-def and so this is kind of representative of what I'd want to be doing. So, it's a little bit fuzzy and we notice the noise is again on this side is really exacerbated since the pixels are expanded a little bit.
Let's go look at the Logitech now. This is just looking at the Logitech. This is the native size coming out of the camera since it is high-def and this video is high-def. We can see we're filling the screen. We've got more dynamic range. The darks over here aren't quite so... there's a little more detail in them. And the brights on this side of my face aren't quite so blown out. It's a little bit flatter on the color, not quite so saturated, but that can be brought up if I really want to with filters in post processing. So I think overall this is obviously, particularly with the noise that we see over here, or the lack of noise that we see over here, it's a much better camera.
And finally, let's go back to side by side mode for one last comparison. And there we have kind of what the two cameras that I have access to look like.
So I want to talk a little bit about why I picked this up.
In April and August there's an event called VEDA: Vlog Every Day in either April or August. And last year I did this in August. I did this on my second channel where I talked about a liitle bit about House of Hacks and things related to making, but also some other personal stuff, so I didn't put it on this main channel because I though it was a little bit off-topic.
This year I'm thinking about doing it in August and have everything related to making. So everyday I'd do a fairly short video on making things. Something more philosophical or quick-tips or something short and sweet, not a big project videos, but something I can do on a daily basis, just to post on the channel to get practice in doing videos on a daily basis kind of thing.
Most of those I'm anticipating would be pre-recorded but I also want to do, like once a week, do a live video. The only webcam I had was built into my Mac and it has pretty low resolution and doesn't work too well. So I wanted to get this kind of in anticipation of doing some live streaming, particularly in August coming up in a couple months. So that was kind of the motivation for getting this.
I am kind of thinking about ideas for what I want to do in that month, plan out an editorial calendar. If you have any ideas of something you'd be interested in hearing me ramble on about, in a live stream or even in something pre-recorded, leave them down in the comments below. I'd love to hear any ideas you might have in that regard.
I think that's it for today.
Until next time, go make something. Perfection's not required. Fun is!
Music credits: Hot Swing by Kevin MacLeod used under Creative Commons 3.0 (http://incompetech.com/)
Transcript
What are fashionable Zoom H1s wearing these days? Find out on today's episode where we talk about accessorizing your Zoom H1.
[Music]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-It-Yourselfers, Harley here.
In the last episode, which I'll link right here, I did a mini-review and test of the new Zoom H1 I received. I didn't have time in that episode to do a review of all the accessory pack that came with that package deal. So, we'll do that in this episode. This accessory pack I bought as a package deal but you can also get them individually from Amazon and probably other retailers. But in this episode, we'll review each of the six items that comes in this accessory pack and see what it looks like.
First up, we'll take a look at the power, the electrical stuff. It came with a little adapter, an AC adapter. It runs off 100 to 240 volts AC, 50 to 60 her, so it'll run pretty much anywhere in the world. It does only have the spade connectors for the US. If you wanted to run it somewhere else, all you'd need is an adapter, you don't need an electrical adapter, just the physical adapters. The cable is just a standard USB cable. It plugs in one side to the Zoom H1 and the other side to your computer. Or to this device right here. All this will do is power it instead of using batteries. There's no charger in it so you can't put rechargeable batteries in it and charge it from this. So, really all this is good for is to run -- if you're on location you have power and you want to plug in and not use batteries. Other than that, for my particular purposes, this doesn't really do me much good. It is nice to have one more cable on hand to kind of clutter things up but again this is something that you don't necessarily need the accessory pack for if this is all you need.
The case is the next thing on the list. This is actually kind of nice. It's a padded case. It's not a soft case, but it's not a hard case either. It's kind of in-between. It does have a belt loop on the back that you use velcro to adjust or put on something besides a belt too I suppose. It's got a little hand strap that is -- it just kind of clips on here. You could use the hand strap for something else if you wanted or it can just snap on there. It does have two zippers that open up and, as I mentioned before, it has a little elastic strap in there, so if it was on your belt or hanging on something, it wouldn't just flop open. And there's a little space inside here, looks like it's probably to put extra memory chips in for extra storage. I don't think you could probably put batteries or anything in there. I'm guessing -- I can't think of anything else you'd put in there besides memory chips. This, and it is custom molded for the Zoom H1. This is probably one of the best parts of the accessory pack in terms of usability and something you couldn't get somewhere else.
Ok, this wind screen is another thing that probably only comes in the accessory kit. For my particular purposes, since I'm going to be using a lav mic most of the time, I don't know that it'll really help me much personally. But if you're going to be using it in this kind of configuration it probably wouldn't be a bad thing to have. I'll do a simple test here with and without the windscreen. So, first of all with:
Peter Piper picked a peck of picked peppers. Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
And now we'll try it without:
Peter Piper picked a peck of picked peppers. Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
And now finally for the two holders. First is this little tripod thingy. It looks kind of cute and all, but frankly it doesn't really work well. It's a little bit top heavy. The base isn't wide enough. The Zoom fits on here about like -- about this long. By the time you get it on there it just really wants to tip over. You can get it balanced so it sort of works but, yeah, I'm not terribly impressed with it. The Zoom is just a bit big for this particular tripod. If you're going to need something like this, my recommendation would be to get one of the small Gorilla Pods. I haven't tried it, I don't have one on hand, but just because of the way they're designed and their adjustability, I suspect they'd probably work a lot better than this does. This just doesn't have enough adjustability, it's not a wide enough base. The other thing you might be able to get some beanbags or sand bags to weight it down. That would probably help quite a bit. It's just the Zoom is too big and the center of gravity is just such that it doesn't really work very well.
In my unboxing video, I hypothesized that this little device was for holding the Zoom H1. I have since changed my mind on that. I've got some more clarity on it after reading the instructions. And I think what this is for is for putting it on a mic stand. After you've attached it in like that you can slide it into the mic stand and it holds it just fine. I think for mic stands that are tapered, where the clips are tapered, I think this would work just fine. I have seen some clips where they're parallel to each other for straight-sided micas. I'm not sure this would work all that well. It's always worth a try anyway.
So there you have it. That's all six items. Overall you have to decide for yourself if it's worth the twenty bucks, or in my case, ten bucks. Really, the only two things, well three things I guess, that you couldn't get somewhere else would be the holder for the mic stand, the case and the little foam padding thing. This isn't worth getting. This is only good if you're not going to run off batteries. And this you can get anywhere. So, these are the only kind of custom things in the box. You have to decide for yourself if it's worth it. For me personally, yeah, it's worth ten bucks, particularly for the case. I think the case is going to be the best thing for me out of all this. And then having extra cables is always nice.
That about wraps up this episode. I did recently notice that Scott over at The Frugal Filmaker has a episode on alternatives to things found in the accessory pack. If you find that interesting, I'll leave a link down in the description. Until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun.
Music: Hot Swing and Guiton Sketch by Kevin MacLeod used under Creative Commons 3.0 (http://incompetech.com/)
Sound effects: http://soungle.com for free use
Photo: Zoom H4N by Mark Turnauckas used under Creative Commons 3.0
Transcript
One man's toy is another man's tool. Regardless of what you call them, today we're going to open up a box of new toys... tools... whatever.
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-It-Yourselfers, Harley here. Today on the House of Hacks we're going to unbox and do an initial reaction to some new audio equipment.
All the videos to date, I've taken using the internal microphone on the camera. I've actually been surprised at how well they've worked. I've done some clean-up in post-processing and in the last video I actually did quite a bit. I was surprised at how well it turned out. But I did want to take it to the next level. So, in order to accomplish that, I got some new audio gear.
I looked at a number of models, did some searching and reading reviews and such. Based on my budget and what I had available, I ended up getting a Zoom H1, an accessory pack and a lavaliere mic.
The lav mic I got from Amazon and including shipping this was about $15. Try to get the box open here. The reviews were fairly favorable even in spite of the low cost. I'm sure it's not as good as a more expensive model but hopefully it'll be better than the built-in mic in the camera. We've got here a little instruction flyer, and that looks like that's about all there is to it. So, this kind of clips on here like so. It's obviously a mono microphone. And that's it for the mic.
The Zoom was available on Amazon and I did some checking around. I wanted to pay by PayPal and Amazon doesn't take PayPal so I did some more searching and found the same model available at B & H Photo for $10 more but it included the accessory pack. Normally the accessory pack is another $20 purchase. So it cost me a little bit more, shipping was equivalent, but I got all the accessories with it too.
In this package, looks like a plastic thing with an instruction manual and a micro-SD card and an adapter to be able to put into your computer for the regular SD card size. The Zoom itself and a battery that is not for retail sale. Probably just a cheap alkaline battery that won't last very long I'm guessing. That's pretty much it for the box on the Zoom. Not much in it but about what you'd expect.
And the accessory pack. I'm not quite sure what's in here. There's a picture on the back that we'll open up and see what it has in it. So, it has a cheap, well I don't know how cheap, an AC adaptor, basically just a USB thing. Based on some of the teardowns I've seen on some of these, I don't know if I'd really trust it. I might do a teardown on this as a separate project just to see how well built it is. Some teardowns I've seen, they're actually dangerous. Here's a windscreen that's designed to go around the whole top of the unit. And looks like a USB cable. Probably bog standard cable, USB A on one side and B on the other. Yeah, looks like the little micro side for one and the side you plug into the computer for the other. This is a little carrying case. Looks like some sort of vinyl case to store it in. It has a little belt clip on it. And a little hand strap. That's kind of nice, it has elastic on it so you can have it on your belt and it won't flop open. That's a nice little detail. This looks like some sort of stand. It looks like it has a 1/4-20 screw on one side, for like a tripod mount. I'm not sure how this goes together. Then there's a little mini-tripod, also with a 1/4-20 mount on it. This looks like it might be useful for things other than just the recorder. Little tripod, you could use it for a small camera too. I'll have to look at the manual see how this is supposed to be used. Oh. Maybe it's supposed to be used like a handheld thing. Yeah. I'll have to look at the manual on that one.
That's it. $10 more than this by itself at Amazon. I got this at B & H Photo. Seems like a fairly good deal.
Ok. So this is what came in the box. This was in the H1 package and this is all the accessories that came in the second package. I'm going to go set everything up and do some initial tests and report back.
Many consumer devices these days use a general purpose LCD graphic display for displaying information and a handful of buttons in order to navigate through a menu system and choose options and control the device. Zoom has chosen not to go down that route and I'm really impressed with the user interface on this thing. The front panel has a LCD display that is unique to this device. It's custom made and everything is displayed in a particular location for that particular function. The only other thing on the front panel is this single button you push it once to start recording and push it again to stop recording. It's that simple. They've made the basic primary function of operating the Zoom very, very easy and I really like that in this device.
On this side of the device there's a headphone jack or a line output jack; it'll work either way. There's a volume control. And the micro-SD card slot.
The top of course are the microphones. And it has this nice little protective plastic to keep the microphones from breaking. Some of their other models have the same configuration on the microphones but they don't have this plastic cover and I've heard reports that they have a tendency to get broken through accidental dropping and normal handling.
The bottom has a very tiny speaker that you can use for just basic monitoring. It's really low fidelity. You can't get a good read on good the quality is of the output because it's so limited by the speaker. But you can tell if you actually got what you were trying to get or not.
This side of the device is all the input functions. It has the microphone input or line input, either way. It has the manual input level controls if you're using manual gain control. It has playback buttons. Forward and back buttons for moving through files, or if you're playing back, it'll do fast forward and reverse to scan through the audio. The middle button is a combination of play and pause. And this button is to delete the file you currently have selected. Moving on we have the power button. You push it down and hold it to turn it on and then when you want to turn it off, you push it down again and hold it and it'll turn it off. You can slide it the opposite direction and it'll stay in that position for hold and, what that means is that all the other buttons are deactivated so you can't accidentally push something, change something, in the middle of recording. And then finally there's the USB connector for the computer.
On the back of the device there are three switches for options. There's a low cutoff switch that will, if enabled, will cut out low frequency noises such as air conditioners or traffic outside, that type of thing. There's the auto level control, you turn it off for manual control in which case the input levels will control the recording level. Or you can turn it on and it will try to figure out the recording level. Auto level control has never worked, it still doesn't work, for decades it hasn't worked, and it still hasn't been figured out and so the recommendation is to leave it off and always use manual control. And finally on the back there's the recording format. WAV for when you need high fidelity or MP3 for a lossy recording. But of course with MP3 you get much greater recording time on any given card. There's a 1/4-20 tripod mount so you can put this on top of a tripod or any other standard device holding mechanism. And then finally the battery connector. It takes a single AA battery.
So that's it for the overview. Beautiful user interface. I love it.
So now let's cover some of the real basic, simple operations of the Zoom.
To turn it on, you hold down the power button and after a second or two it comes on and it's ready to record at this point. You can see all the different functions on the screen and when you press the button it goes into record mode. And you can see it now starting to count up that says you're recording. You have the options of the bit rate it's recording at and whether the low pass filter is on or off. You can see the current recording levels, the battery status, all these nice and nifty little things. When you're done recording, all you have to do is push the same button again and you're done. It's that simple. It's really nice.
So, to do some of the option setups, they're on the back here. You've got the WAV and MP3 are the two primary things you'd probably be changing on a fairly frequent basis. For the WAV format, you switch it over to WAV and the forward and back buttons allow you to change the bit rate. Here you can see on the front panel it's 48k with 16 bit depth and you have 2 hours and 24 minutes of recording time on this particular SD card. If you press the button, it changes it to 44k and 24 bit depth and now it drops to an hour and 44 remaining. You can cycle through all the different options by pressing these buttons and seeing the changes in the record time. The same thing happens when you switch it to MP3 format. Now instead of having the sampling frequency and bit depth, now you simply have the standard bit depth settings for MP3s.The low is 48 kilobits per second and it will cycle all the way up to 320 on the high side and it also shows the recording time for each bit depth. So, you can kind of make a balance between the quality you need and the recording time that you need. You can see here 320 for MP3 format gives us over 11 hours of recording time on this particular SD card. If I switch it to WAV format we're down in the hour and 44 minute range; even less if we go up to 96k samples per second. At the highest density WAV format we have less than an hour of record time. So, MP3 format definitely does have a higher recording density.
The input jack is a stereo input but if you plug a mono microphone into it, it will only record on the left channel. Of course you can take care of that in post by duplicating the channel and putting it on both sides, but it is a limitation on here. You need an adapter for mono to stereo if you want to record on both channels.
When you're all done, you again hold down the power button until it says "Good-bye" and it turns itself off.
So that's it for real basic operation of the Zoom. Let's go over to the computer and see what it looks like when you connect it to the computer.
When you plug the Zoom into the computer, it comes on with the screen flashing between "Audio" and "Card." If you press the button when it says "Audio," it will appear to the computer as an audio source. If you press the button when it says "Card" then it will appear as an external drive. You can use the normal filesystem utilities, for example Finder on the Mac or Explorer on Windows, to manipulate the files on the Zoom. Typically you'd probably move them somewhere for further use. When done, you can simply eject the drive and disconnect it.
I'm going to read a short speech now and record it using both the onboard microphone on the camera and also the new lav mic with the Zoom and in post-processing I'll switch between the two so you can hear the difference and do a side-by-side comparison.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
As you can tell, the audio from this sounds much better than the audio from the beginning of this video. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the way this turned out and looking forward to using it on future videos.
So, that's about it for this show.
Other than the unboxing, I forgot to say anything about the accessory pack. This video's already long enough, so I'll take care of that in another video.
Until next time, go make something, it doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun.
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-It-Yourselfers. Harley here. I've got a project coming up in a couple months that requires measuring things in grams. I'm born and bred here in the United States and grams don't mean a whole lot to me. So, to kind of put that in perspective, a nickel, a US nickel, is five grams and a penny is two and a half grams. A 1000 grams, a kilogram, is about 2.2 pounds. So, I needed to measure things that are very light. All I had available to me was a kitchen scale that measured up to 10 or 12 pounds or a bathroom scale, neither of which would work well measuring down into these low ranges. So, I went out to Amazon and did some searching around and based on reviews, I picked up this little scale. It's made by AWS and it's a Blade one kilogram digital pocket scale. A tenth of a gram accuracy. Backlit display. Includes two AAA batteries. So, we'll open the box, do some initial tests and see what it looks like.
After finishing up the unboxing, I kind of cleared off the table and got rid of everything, so we really have a vinyl case, a little hard plastic protection case that the thing fits in, and the scale itself. It's 2.7 inches square and designed, I think actually it's designed for a food scale. It's small enough to carry with you so if you're on a diet you can measure the quantity of food you're taking in.
To open it up, you just push and it pops open and now we have a little display here with three buttons. We have an on/off button, mode button and a tare button. On/off does exactly what it says. Mode allows you to switch between grams, ounces, troy ounces and pennyweight. I've heard of troy ounces, I think it's used in jewelry making. I've never heard of pennyweight; I'm not sure what that does or what that's used for. And then tare allows us to put something on here and zero out the scale to be able to weigh just the contents of what's in there.
So let's turn this on. Speaking of power, you noticed in the unboxing the batteries were shipped put in backwards with a little plastic tab in there. So during the unboxing process, I put the batteries in properly and pulled the tab out. They put that in there for shipping so it doesn't drain the batteries.
When we turn it on, it comes up in the default mode of grams with a zero zero. I've got some pennies here. According to the US Mint web site, pennies are supposed to be 2.5 grams. We'll take a look and see what we end up with here. This one is, this one is 3.1 grams which is a little heavy. I'm not sure what's going on there. This one shows 2.4. And this one says 2.5. And this one says another 2.5. Hmm. This one shows 2.6. 2.5. 2.6. This one also says 3.1. Wonder if they changed the weights sometime, over time. This one says 2.6. This one says three also. I'm guessing these are older pennies based on their color. That's a '76. This one's an '81. This one says, ooh, '59, wow. That's an old penny. So apparently older pennies weigh more than newer pennies do. These are all much newer based on their color. And, looking at the years, yeah, these are all within the last decade or so. Here's one from earlier in the '90s. But, yeah, these are all '90s and 2000s. So apparently somewhere in the late '80s sounds like they changed the weight. So four pennies should be 10 grams if things are calculating right. And right at 10.1. So this looks like it's weighing pretty well.
And just for grins and giggles, I've got some nickels here. Nickels are supposed to be five grams and five and ten and 14.9 and 19.9. So, yeah, they seem to be adding up. It looks like it's working pretty well for these ranges of weights.
I've got a one and a quarter pound weight. I did some conversion, I think this is supposed to be 567 grams. We'll see if that fits on there and what it weighs out to. It shows 587 grams, but you know, it's just a weight. Twenty grams is I'm sure well with in tolerances for just an iron weight for working out with. And that one shows exactly the same. I'm guessing these are more inaccurate than the scale itself from what I've seen so far with pennies and such. So I'm going to call this kind of good. The mode you just cycle through to get the different weighting systems.
And let's give tare a try. So, if we put something on here we're going to use as a container, that comes out to be 141 grams, we hit tare and it resets to zero so now we can weigh just the contents. Let's use some of our older pennies. So that should be like 9.3, right on the nose. There we go. 9.4. So it looks like those are 3.1 grams originally from the older pennies. Looks like everything works well.
I did find after the unboxing, inside the box stuffed in there, there was a user's manual which I didn't see in the initial unboxing. I did go online and find it. It's also available there at the manufacturer's website. This scale can be calibrated which is kind of nice if it gets out of calibration. I don't have a calibration weight though; you need a 500 gram weight to be able to calibrate it. But, you just hold down the mode button and it goes into calibration mode and automatically does its thing and it's done. So that's it. I don't remember what I paid; it was in the $22, $23 range I think on Amazon. Maybe $18 or something like that.
It looks like for my purposes it's going to work really well. It's nice, small, lightweight, looks like it's reasonably accurate.
I recorded that video a couple weeks ago and since then I've had an opportunity to use it. There were two features that I discovered that were not documented in the manual.
First of all it has an auto-off feature. When you let it sit for somewhere, I'm not sure what the exact timeout value is, it's somewhere less than a minute, probably 30 seconds to 45 seconds, without having any changes in the weight, it would automatically turn itself off.
The second feature that it had is that when you did turn it on, anything that you had on the plate, it would calibrate that to be zero. It's kind of like the tare feature button that I mentioned earlier that automatically happens when you turn the device on.
These features individually seem like decent features to have. I can't complain about either one of them. However, when they're combined in the particular workflow that I was experiencing, they caused some problems. And I didn't find any way to be able to turn them off, which would have been nice.
The workflow I was doing was I'd weigh something out, I'd go do something, I'd come back to it and want to add to what I'd already weighed out. And the problem of course was in that time period that I was away from it and come back, it'd turn itself off. Then when I turned it back on, of course what was on there got zeroed out. So I had to do the math in terms of what was on there and what I was adding, I had to do all that in my head. It would have been nice, because I was looking for a total weight, it would have been nice if I could have turned one of those features off, and then it would have worked exactly, perfectly, for my workflow.
Other than that one caveat, it worked really well. The accuracy seem to be decent. I didn't have anything that was obviously wrong with it. Everything worked out in the end as if the weights were correct. So, I can't say they were wrong. And it worked correctly every time, other than the one caveat. So overall I thought it was a good little scale, particularly for the price.
So that's it for this review. Until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun.
