Labists Starter Kit For Raspberry Pi 4: Everything you need to know

Description

Interested in a Labists Starter Kit For Raspberry Pi 4? In this episode, Harley unboxes, assembles and runs through the initial setup wizards for one of these kits.

Sign up for book updates: https://list-optin.house-of-hacks.com/
The kit I got: https://amzn.to/3oYXY45 (Affiliate link)
A list of different kits: https://amzn.to/2TZj187 (Affiliate link)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Labists Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi 4.

Here's a list of the tools I use.

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 4.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"

Contents

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:34 Unboxing
• 7:14 Assembly
• 18:11 Setup
• 20:37 First time startup

Transcript

Introduction

Today at the House of Hacks we're going to unbox and setup this Labists Raspberry Pi Starter Kit.

OK, the box it comes in is nice and sturdy, not much to it.

Just kind of your basic box.

We're going to go ahead and open this up.

It's got a couple anti-tamper stickers on it.

And we'll just open this up.

Recently I've had some ideas floating around my head for some projects where it needed a little bit more computing power than what an Arduino supplies but I still wanted to be fairly close to the hardware.

So, of course the Raspberry Pi is a great solution for this.

Having never worked with Raspberry Pis before I didn't have anything and I wanted a starter kit to just get going quickly.

So, I searched on Amazon and found this Labists Starter Kit. It came with pretty high reviews and seemed to be pretty complete. So I went ahead and got one.

It's supposed to have a case and power supply and other miscellaneous things that you need to get started.

It doesn't have a keyboard or monitor, of course, but I have those in plenty.

I went ahead and got one of these. It has 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB SD card and so I thought I'd open this up and show you what it takes to get started.

If we're just meeting, I'm Harley. Welcome. This is the House of Hacks where I make stuff.

Usually out of metal or wood, other kinds of media like that. Sometimes it includes things like Arduinos and Raspberry Pis.

Unboxing

It starts off with a Raspberry Pi Model B. 8 gig of RAM.

That looks like the main box or the main computer.

I have to rip the box and there's the Pi.

They are pretty small little units, aren't they?

It has the connectors on the side. The power supply.

Network. USB. Looks like USB 2 and 3.

And yeah, there's not much to it. Not much bigger than an Arduino.

Just for size comparisons, there's an Arduino Uno.

It's a little bit bigger but about the same size.

Digging more into the box...

Packing material.

Oh, and inside this box looks like there's some basic instructions and a fairly large piece of paper with multiple language instructions.

We've got a Quick Start Guide.

A power supply... with an on/off switch.

Labists power supply.

We have, looks like a case.

I assume it snaps open somehow. I won't do that on camera but it's got holes for the connectors.

It must go this way. There's the connectors that way and that way.

And interestingly, it looks like it has a 1/4-20 connector on there which I'm guessing they may have it setup for putting a camera on this. That kind of looks like a camera hole. I don't know exactly.

That looks like a hole for a lens on a camera. They might have an aboard board camera you could put on there and then that would be for taking pictures with.

Interesting little concept.

HDMI cable.

This looks like another HDMI cable.

That's definitely HDMI... and that's definitely HDMI.

So, two HDMI cables.

A cute little tiny fan.

I assume that goes in the case.

An SD card that says Raspbian on it. So, I assume it's preloaded with the operating system. That's handy.

I don't recognize that.

I'll have to read the manual for that one.

A little screwdriver for mounting the fan.

Some heat sinks.

And that's it.

So, everything that comes in the box.

Those are the things that are inside the box in this kit. I want to get into the setup of this and see what happens when we turn it on for the first time but before that I do have an exciting announcement.

Those are you that have been around the channel for awhile may have noticed that my uploads this year have been down from previous years.

That's not because I've been slacking off but because I've been working on a new project.

This is a beginner's guide to working with electronics, specifically the Arduino ecosystem.

So, if you've been interested in getting Arduinos into your projects but don't know anywhere to begin, this book is for you.

I talk about three things in it...

Basic electronics. What is a transistor. What is a resistor. Real basic things like that.

And then I talk about how to setup a computer to program an Arduino.

And third, I talk about the basic elements of what goes into an Arduino program and the fundamental programming issues related to that.

If this is something that's interesting to you, I've left a link down below for a mailing list where I'll be announcing when the book is released and also providing a discount code for those that are interested.

Assembly

Now that we've got everything unpacked, let's assemble this.

The Quick Start Guide is fairly thick and a bit intimidating at first glance but there's six languages in here so for any one language there's only about four pages.

Half of those four pages are how to install the operating system on a blank SD card.

The SD card that comes with this is already pre-formatted so we don't need to worry about those two pages.

About half of the rest is specifications and what comes in the kit.

So there's really about a page, page and a half, of actual instructions for getting started and those seem to be really clear in reading things over.

I don't have any questions off the top of my head.

We'll see how complete they are once we get into it and see if we have any questions.

The mystery piece that I wasn't sure when I was unboxing it is actually an SD card reader which is kind of handy.

It's a type C connector. It pulls apart and there's the connector for plugging into USB and there's where the SD card goes in on the back side.

So that's kind of cute. It's an inexpensive one. It's not great but I'm sure it works for the purposes that we have here today.

There's really only a couple steps we need to do.

We need to install the heat sinks onto the card.

We need to install the fan into the case.

And then we need to install the card into the case and put it all together.

Finally we can install the SD card after the card is in the case and then apply power and keyboard and monitor and see how it works.

They do say that you don't want to have the SD card in the computer when you're trying to put it in the case.

I think there's a fitment problem trying to get it all lined up and stuff.

So you put the card in after everything is assembled and put together.

So, let's get to this.

First we're going to put the heat sinks on the chips and the manual says exactly which ones they go onto and they are self adhesive so they should go on fairly easily.

We've got this one goes on that chip.

We've got this square one that goes on the main CPU.

And then we have this other smaller one that goes on, looks like the chip that's right there.

So that's how it's assembled.

Time to get out the tools.

I've got a pick that works really well for taking off things like self-adhesive tape when it's hard to get off.

That one wasn't too bad.

So that goes on... try to get my fat fingers in here on this little board. That goes on that chip.

Just press it on.

This self-adhesive tape isn't too bad to take apart. Sometimes it can be a real pain.

That does on that chip.

And this goes on the last one.

I assume that is the primary CPU. It's this metal cased one.

That was easily done and I didn't need the pick at all.

So now we want to install things in the case.

The case just pulls apart. There's a little handle there.

And there's screws for mounting the board and there's screws for mounting the fan.

It seems that there's more screws there than I actually need.

And this case also is designed for a camera. I didn't get the camera option but there is a hole in the case and mounting space to snap a camera in there.

The fan can go in two ways. There's no indication of air flow.

I don't know that it really makes a difference which way it goes in.

I'll put it in this way so the strain relief on the cable pulls up.

The self tapping screws go into the fan. They have a round head on the top.

They're a bit longer than the screws in the other package that are for the card.

You don't want to torque them down too tight since you may strip out the plastic.

You just need to make them so it holds things in without rattling.

And that's the fan in there.

Next we need to mount the board.

It's pretty obvious. There's big holes in the case go for the USB and ethernet port.

And this should just drop in there.

And there are...

It seems to fit... fairly snugly.

There we go. You can kind of feel it where it snaps in.

You want to make sure the connectors are all lined up with the holes and the connectors on the side actually fit into the holes on here so there's a bit of a snap feel to it.

Get the other screws.

These screws I'm going to need the spectacles for.

It'd be nice if this screw driver was magnetic but that one went in without too much difficulty.

On screws like this, I tend to start them, get them all started, and then I go through later and with a second pass tighten them down for good.

That way you don't... If you tighten it down one at a time, sometimes you'll knock things out of alignment and then it's harder to get the other screws in.

And for both sets of screws, they sent me one screw more than I actually needed. Which was convenient since I dropped of those on the floor. I'll have to go retrieve that later.

And then I can go through a second time and tighten everything down.

Again, you don't want to tighten it down too tight because you don't want to strip the threads or the head.

And this screwdriver seems to be possibly at end of days.

This one screw... No this one screw has some munged up threads.

The screwdriver is fine. The head is rounded out without putting any torque on that at all.

And I can't get it out so now I need to get the pliers.

Let's try the extra screw that they gave me.

Those are magnetized and it's making it hard to get the screw in.

Once you have threads in plastic you want to do a technique called indexing where you turn backwards until you feel a click and then you can go forwards again.

That way you're not cutting new threads into the plastic.

And this new new screw worked much better.

There we go.

So I think now we are ready to put the operating system SD card into the case.

There's a small slot right there on the back of the case that this should slide into just like so.

And yeah, it protrudes out so if that was in the card when we tried to put the card in here, we'd have problems getting it in. So that's definitely what's going on there.

Now we're ready to wire up the fan.

The fan goes in this way and there's two options on this.

The red wire is positive and the black wire is negative and the manual says which ones go where with some pretty detailed instructions.

There are two options on this fan. You can either run it at low speed on 3.3 volts or at high speed on 5 volts, both of which are available right here on the GPIO connector.

And the black one is ground and it's on pin 6 which it shows right there.

I'll orient this in the way it shows in the diagram. Pin 6 is the third one on the top. So it goes in there.

And then the red is either pin 1 for 3.3 volts or pin 2 for 5 volts.

So I'm going to put it on 5 volts because, hey, more power! Right?

And then everything should just snap together if I can figure out which way this goes on.

And there we have it. We're ready for power, keyboard and video.

Setup

So, we have the things that came with the kit and a few extra items in order to use this.

We need an external monitor. This is a small HDMI monitor that is designed for use with video equipment but any HDMI output source will work.

I also have a keyboard and mouse. Those are really the only things you need in addition to what comes in the kit.

For the purposes of today and this particular setup, I also have an HDMI splitter so that I can run the signal out of the Raspberry Pi, not only to the monitor, but also into my computer to be able to record it and capture it in high quality so that you can see what's going on in the video.

That complicates this particular setup but that's not a setup that you'd normally need when working with the Raspberry Pi.

One thing of note, is while the power supply that comes with a Pi looks like a normal wall wart, it is a high power device.

The Pi requires more than what most wall warts produce.

Most wall warts output in the milliamp to maybe 1.5 amp range.

The Pi needs more than that and this particular one that came with this kit is a 3000 milliamp, or 3 amp, power supply.

So, you do want to make sure that if you're not using a kit that you get a power supply that has sufficient output for the Pi's use.

If you don't have a power supply that has enough power, you'll get weird things happening.

It'll work sometimes and not others.

It will just work for awhile and then suddenly not work.

Just kind of bizarre things like that. So if you do have problems like that and you don't have a power supply that came with a kit, make sure that the output of the power supply is sufficient for the Raspberry Pi.

Let's start putting this together.

Everything's plugged in now, including the power supply into the wall.

I've got the software running on the computer to capture the screen.

I'm using OBS by the way just to record everything.

It's Open Broadcast Software I believe is what it's called and we're just using that as screen capture at this point off the HDMI input and the little converter thingy that I have.

Let's turn it on and see what happens.

First time startup

Down here in the corner I have overlaid a time code on the screen capture.

I'll be speeding up through parts of this so we don't have to wait during the entire video.

The time code will show the actual length of time it took in real life.

It takes a bit to start up and now we have a background with this welcome message.

I'm going to go ahead and hit Next and now we get a chance to setup our country, language and time zone.

I'll set mine for the United States and since I'm in Mountain Time, I'll select Boise.

Clicking Next it takes a couple seconds to set that and now we have the opportunity to set the password for the main account.

I'll put that in here what I want to use and click Next again.

Now it's asking about screen setup.

We can see around the outside edges here that we have a black border where the background screen doesn't take up the whole screen.

This has to do with different HDMI display devices and sometimes you'll see these bars and sometimes you won't.

Since we see them here, I'm going to click this check box and that should remove them in the future.

So now I'll click Next to save this.

And the next step is it's looking for wireless networks.

We can see a bunch from the neighborhood here so I'll scroll down here and select mine and it refreshes the list and now I have to select it again and hit Next.

And now it's asking for my wireless network password. I'll put that in and continue on.

And now it wants to update the software. I'm going to click Next and...

uh, oh. For some reason it didn't connect to the network. I'll have to look into that.

For now, we'll just move along. That's something that I can do in the future.

And I guess that's it for the setup wizard. It's going to reboot and let's see what happens.

OK. That didn't take too long.

Now we can see the whole screen is being used. We don't have the black borders, so that worked.

In the top right corner here we can see that we now have a network connection.

Now let's go look at the software installer.

I'll go over here to the menu and click on the Raspberry Pi icon to pull the menu down and then I'll go down here into Preferences.

Let's start with this Recommended software option.

It'll start off by checking for updates so it's going out to the network and seeing what's different between what's been released now and what the software was originally setup for.

Well that took about a minute. Now we can see all the menu items that are part of the recommended list for the Raspberry Pi ecosystem.

On the left we have different categories and when you select one it shows the items in that list.

You can check or uncheck the box on the far right to add or remove the options that you want installed on your particular Raspberry Pi.

After you have everything you want selected, click Apply and it'll start installing or removing as you've directed.

This may take a bit depending on what you've selected and the speed of your internet connection.

Fortunately it does a good job of telling you what it's doing with all the status messages and the progress bar.

After it's gone through and figured everything out, we get this completion dialog when it finishes.

If I hit Apply again, we'll see that nothing happens since it's all caught up.

So I hit Close to finish this step.

And so now if we look here in the menus, we can see that it installed the software that we asked for.

Now I want to make sure that the operating system is up to date.

To do that, I'm going to go to the terminal window and run a command.

"sudo apt update" will check for updates for everything that's installed on the Pi, both at the base operating system level as well as any additionally installed applications.

It takes a little bit, but generally not terribly long.

When it finishes, we get back to the command prompt.

All this has really done is update some internal lists so that it knows what needs to be updated. It hasn't actually done any updates.

To do the actual updates, I'm going to run the command "sudo apt full-upgrade".

This will compare what I have installed to the update list and tell me what needs to be changed.

I have the option to continue or not. Hitting return selects the default Yes answer that's indicated by the capital Y and off it goes.

This does take awhile. It's a two step process. First it has to download all the actual items that it needs to install and then it has to actually install them.

Again, it does provide good feedback while it's doing this but it may take some time depending on how much needs to be changed and the speed of your internet.

In this situation, it took between 7 and 8 minutes that I've sped up through here.

Now that the updating is all done, I want to see how much storage space I have available for future development.

I'm going to use the "df" command with the "-h" option.

On the first line it's showing that I have 3.1 gig used and 110 gig is available.

That's out of 128 gig SD card. So that'd not doing too bad.

There is some overhead for the operating system of course and things like that.

The update process downloaded a bunch of files that really aren't needed anymore.

To clean those up I'm going to use a "sudo apt clean" command. That doesn't take any time to run. It just returns immediately.

Running the "df -h" command again shows that now I have 3.0 gig used, freeing up about 100 megabytes. Not a whole lot, but every little bit counts.

Now I'm done setting this up and so we're going to use the exit command to close the terminal.

All told, that took around 19 minutes to do the initial setup and now the Raspberry Pi is ready to be used.

For now I'm going to shut it down by selecting Logout and then clicking Shutdown.

You always want to make sure you do this when you shutdown so that everything gets written out to the SD card properly.

Do you have a Raspberry Pi now? Or are you thinking about getting one? What are your plans for it? Leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear about it.

I'll see you over here in this video that YouTube thinks you're going to enjoy.

And when making things remember...
Perfection's not required.
Fun is!

How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Description

Wondering about how to build a portable air hose reel cart? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows an install method for his new air hose reel that's portable and uses a new-to-him construction material: SteelTek. There are many ways of mounting an air hose reel but sometimes you don't want it in a permanent location. This option will allow you to move the reel around. This is a small test to see the applicability of this product for future SteelTek projects.

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, you may subscribe here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the House of Hacks' values, here’s a playlist for you.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to make a portable air hose reel cart

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "The Whip Theme", "Pump", "There It Is", "Guiton Sketch", "Cool Rock"

Transcript

There's got to be a better way.

Hi. If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we use our God-given creative talents in the workshop to make things out of wood, metal, electronics and other things like that.

Today we're going to be working on a storage system for this compressor hose.

As part of the car project, I picked up a new air compressor. And along with that came a number of new things that are related to the air compressor itself. Things like the air hose and other miscellaneous bits and bobs that are used to connect hoses together and things like that. And eventually I expect I'll be getting some more air tools and I need a place to store those. To help keep the garage organized and less cluttered, I need a place to store some of this new stuff.

I got a ReelWorks hose reel to store the hose on but now I need a place to mount this and I don't want to mount it permanently to the wall anywhere in the garage because I don't really have a good place for it in there and I don't know exactly how I'm going to be using it, where I'm going to be using it, so I wanted a portable solution.

So today I'm going to look at making a cart that this hose reel will mount to and then will also have additional storage that possibly in the future might be expandable to store additional air tools and things like that in that I purchase in the future.

Let's open this up, get some basic dimensions on it because it will be kind of the core around which everything else will be built.

[Unboxing ReelWorks hose reel]

This is what came in the box: the reel, a manual, a strain-relief spring, a connector fitting and the handle.

A little tiny bit of assembly required.

When I ordered the air hose, I also ordered an air filter and a three foot section of hose.

The idea was I will mount the air filter close to the hose reel and that will filter out any contaminants that are in the air line.

I'll get another hose, probably in the 20 foot range, that will go from the air filter to the air compressor.

From my research online, that's a good length to have between the air compressor and the air filter in order to allow time for anything that's suspended in the air flow to condense out and for the air filter to actually be able to be effective.

Then I'll have the longer hose that will wrap onto the hose reel to move around for actual use of the compressed air.

So, let's assemble this, make some drawings and see what we come up with.

[Hose reel assembly]

[Drawing cart elevations]

OK. Here's the concept.

We've got elevation drawings for the front, the top and the side.

The hose reel goes right here and we've got castors on the bottom.

It's 19 inches from the edge of this handle to where this curves up and it's 13 inches tall from the base here where it mounts to the outside edge and it's 11 inches around in this direction.

So the idea is to build a square base that has castors on it depicted by the circles down there so that'll allow it to roll around and have a plate on the bottom that the reel will mount to and then also have two supports that come up and that are joined at the top and it's going to be offset from the center.

It'll be behind the reel.

And that will be what the air filter connects to and then there will be a hose that runs from here down around into the bottom of where it mounts to to connect the incoming air from the air filter into the hose reel.

And I may think about putting some sort of storage media on top here somewhere.

I need to be careful about how big this is though because I don't want it to go above the handle, so it might look like something along these lines where it covers a portion of that space to hold odds and ends and nick-naks.

I don't want it to get all the way to the edge though otherwise it'll make it hard to spin the handle.

So that's the general idea. Let's go see if we can find some parts to build this with.

[Parts shopping]

[Parts cutting]

I was walking through Lowe's the other day in the plumbing department and noticed this really cool material that I hadn't seen in there before.

It's a whole system for making things with. It doesn't really belong in the plumbing aisle as far as I'm concerned other than it has these tubes that kind of looks like plumbing but it's not a plumbing system at all.

It's really a, basically a, Tinkertoys for adults.

They have all kinds of different connectors. These happen to be Ls and I also got some intersection connectors that have one pipe go through on the one direction and has another connector attach something in.

But they have all kinds of different connectors for Ts and multiple intersections coming together in pretty much all the different configurations you can think of of pipes coming together.

They also have adjustable connectors where you can have set screws and put the pipe in and adjust it to different angles depending on the purposes for whatever it is you're building.

It seems like a really cool system.

According to the web site, it comes in 3/8, 3/4 and 1-1/4 inch sizes and in galvanized and in black.

Now my local Lowe's only had it in 3/4 and 1-1/4 sizes and only in galvanized so I haven't seen the smaller size or the black.

For this particular project, the 3/4 is what I got because that was the smallest size they had but it's really overkill.

3/8 probably would have been way more than sufficient.

Each of the connectors have set screws in them that are tightened with an Allen wrench that tighten down onto the pipe and hold it in place.

It seems to be a really solid, robust system and I have a number of projects that I think it'll work really well for but I wanted to use it on this smaller project just for testing things out.

It is not a very cheap system.

These eight connectors and a 10 foot section of pipe ran me about $70 so compared to like copper or PVC that you might use for a similar application from the plumbing aisle where the connectors are in the cents to dollar range, it's much more pricey but it also is much more robust, rigid system.

The pipe comes pre-cut in various lengths from about I think 4 inches was the smallest in I think 2 inch increments up to a certain size and then it started going in foot increments.

The pipe was pretty expensive when purchased in the smaller sections so I ended up getting a 10 foot section which was the longest I could get and the cheapest per foot and then just cut it up to what I needed for this project.

I cut three 20 inch sections for the cross members and four 15 inch sections for the width and the height and now it's just a matter of connecting everything together with the Allen wrench.

Let's put it together.

[Frame assembly]

OK, that's all there is to it. This is a real sturdy system. I'm real impressed. Like I said, this is way overkill for this particular project, but don't have to worry about the hose reel going anywhere.

The next step is to cut some plates to mount things to.

A buddy of mine gave me some of these surplus moving dollies that his company built.

It's basically a piece of heavy duty sheet metal with a bunch of castors on the bottom.

The castors are a little gummed up, a little worn out possibly, possibly just dirty.

So, I'm going to tear these apart, clean them up and cut the metal down to fit in here and use a couple of the castors for the four corners of the hose reel.

[Moving dolly disassembly and cleaning]

OK, that worked really well.

I first started by trying to spray some WD-40 in one of them and realized that was going to take a lot of WD-40 and a lot of fiddling with things so I had the idea to take it upstairs and run them under some water and within seconds of putting them under water they immediately freed up.

That tells me that the thing that was really keeping these things from moving freely was dirt and probably soda.

These things were used to move soda vending machines around and my guess is they just got a lot of soda in there that kind of caked the dirt in there and made everything really gummy because, like I said, within seconds of putting it under the water they were moving freely.

I did use some soap and tried to clean things up pretty well. Had a lot of dirt come out of it as I was running it through the water and now I've kind of soaked them in WD-40 to drive all that moisture out, to lubricate them a little bit and to protect the surfaces from rust.

WD-40 makes a great solvent and water displacer. It does a little bit of surface protection and lubrication but that's not really it's strength.

So, once this WD-40 kind of evaporates out and displaces all the water, I'll get some oil, 3-in-1 oil or something similar to that, and just kind of lubricate this up for long term lubrication and protection.

The next step is to take those metal plates and cut it down to try to make it fit for the frame that I made earlier.

[Metal cutting, filing and drilling]

[Final assembly]

Well, that's a lot more compact and I think it's going to be easier to use. I don't have to unroll the whole hose in order to use things and we've got the filter on it now.

I didn't get it as far done as I would have liked. I would have liked to have painted the wood and gotten the storage system on top but I just have other projects I need to get to and ran out of time.

So, I'm going to call this good for now. Eventually I can do those as future upgrades.

Over here are some videos that YouTube thinks you're going to enjoy and remember when making things, as this demonstrates...

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

How effective are moving blankets for sound deadening?

Description

They're cheap but are they effective? Today at the House of Hacks, Harley investigates if it makes sense to use moving blankets for acoustic treatment. People have tried different sound absorption techniques to remove room echo from recording spaces. Acoustic foam panels and a sound blanket are two popular items. Moving blankets appear similar to sound blankets and are considered DIY sound absorption materials, but how well do they work in a recording studio for sound absorption? Today we're going to measure the difference between having them and not having them actually makes.

Affiliate links:
12 Moving blankets
1 Real acoustic blanket

Resources:
How to measure echo in a room

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. 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.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Workshop Organization Systems - Quick and easy overhead bins

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

[Door bell]

Oh, FedEx. Thanks!

Do you need to reduce echo in a room for recording?

Today, we're going to look at these moving blankets and measure how well they actually work for this application.

[Introduction]

Hi! Harley here.

I'm down here in the workshop which is in the unfinished portion of our basement.

It's got concrete walls, concrete floors, and from this app we can see we've got 0.65 seconds of decay time.

To try to get that down, I got some moving blankets from Amazon, very cheap, and I want to see if this is actually going to make a difference in the echo in this space where I can hang them from the ceiling, drape them around the workshop, as I'm recording to try to get the echo down.

Let's open it up and give it a try.

[Opening package]

There are twelve blankets for less than $60 from Amazon.

I'll leave a link in the description below.

By comparison, you can get an acoustic blanket that's marketed as such for $75 for just one.

But the question is: does this inexpensive option really make a difference?

I haven't spent the money to compare the difference between the moving blankets and the one that's really designed for the purpose, but I can compare the difference between with and without these moving blankets.

First, I installed an application on my phone to actually measure the echo.

And as we saw in the opening, without the blankets, the echo is 0.65 seconds.

I'm going to use some spring clamps to hang the blankets around the workshop.

[Hanging and draping blankets]

So, I'm really impressed!

Depending on the test, it was between 0.19 and 0.43 [sic] seconds delay after adding the blankets.

That's between...

...about a third on the high end and not quite half on the higher end.

So, yeah, these blankets really do make a difference.

How that compares to an acoustic blanket? I don't know.

I'm not going to spend that much money, but they do make a difference.

That's a good thing.

I'll certainly be using these in the future when I'm recording to reduce the echo in here.

I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.

If yours leans towards marking things and you're interested in future House of Hacks workshop related videos, hit the round House of Hacks icon over there and then hit the bell notification and YouTube will let you know next time I upload something.

And down below are some videos YouTube thinks you might be interested in.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Impact 7' wall-mounted boom arm unboxing and first impressions

Description

The Impact 7' wall-mounted boom arm provides an overhead adjustable location to mount photography equipment to in a studio environment. In this House of Hacks episode, Harley unboxes a new boom arm and gives his first impressions of it.

Purchase on Amazon: Impact 7' wall-mounted boom arm (Affiliate link)

Impact web site: http://www.impactstudiolighting.com

Subscribe for more DIY videos.

Watch my most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to Impact 7' wall-mounted boom arm unboxing and first impressions

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 some studio equipment.

[Intro music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Photographers. Harley here.

My buddy Rich ordered a 7 foot, long-arm, adjustable, wall mounted bracket for studio lights for his photography studio.

And this is going to be an unboxing of that unit and kind of first impressions; see how I like it based on initial impressions.

I expect two follow-up videos from this.

One will be where I'm making a bracket that allows us to mount it in different locations in the studio in different rooms so it's not kind of a single fixed location.

It'll give us a little bit of flexibility in the studio.

And then I expect a second follow-up video of real world experiences with it. How we like it once it's in place and we've put it through it's paces.

So if this is your first time here at House of Hacks, welcome! I'm glad you're here.

If you're interested in making things related to woodworking, metalworking, photography, electronics, computers, things of that nature, hit the subscribe button and YouTube will notify you next time I upload a video.

So let's get to this.

He ordered this from B & H. It came in a box. It's not terribly heavy. I'm guessing probably less than 20 pounds. I probably could look on the packing list if I really was that interested in it. It's not terribly heavy.

It's got some bubble wrap.

Lots of bubble wrap.

Wow! Lots and lots and lots of bubble wrap.

So, this box, big huge box, it's only about a third full. We've got a box inside a box.

And the official name for this is an "Impact Wall-Mounted Boom Arm, 7' HD." I assume that refers to "heavy duty."

It's got mounting hardware included. One year limited warrantee.

And I'll leave a link to the manufacturer's web site in the description below.

So now we'll just kind of slice open the inside box.

It's also got B & H tape on it. Makes me wonder if it's been opened once before.

It doesn't really make a big... probably a big difference, as long as it's in good shape. Somebody may have ordered it and it wasn't quite what they were looking for.

Trying to figure out how this box opens up. There we go.

And there's the good stuff. It's of course wrapped in plastic. Boy, it looks like it's all already assembled. There is a little bit of hardware and a manual.

So we've got a little, couple page instruction manual. Basically says loosen these knobs, specifications.

Maximum extension 7 feet.

Minimum extension 3 feet 9, or 3.9 feet.

Maximum recommended load at full extension is 12 pounds. So it should handle a light without any problem.

Pan movement 180 degrees.

Tilt movement 180 degrees.

Attachment type is standard studs.

And that's pretty much it. A couple other minor statistics. That's it.

And then some mounting hardware. Basically just some screws, washers, drywall anchors, a Allen wrench, probably for some adjustment somewhere that you set once and forget it, and some sort of bracket that we'll probably figure out once we get more into it.

And now we have the unit itself. It is just wrapped up in some plastic. Big plastic bag.

Like I said, it looks like it's fully assembled so, besides mounting it, I don't think there's much you need to do to it to put it into use.

It's not like there's assembly of different pieces required.

So this piece mounts to the wall. It's a little bit stiff, but that's probably adjustable.

We have these brackets here that I expect will allow it to tip. There we go.

And there's some bubble wrap on here. It doesn't look like it's ever been taken apart so even if the box was opened, I don't think it's probably an issue of any sort.

OK, I got the bubble wrap off of this. Just a little bit of packing stuff to keep it from getting scratched up.

There's two sliders on here that control the angle up and down. So this slider slides on the bottom part that's kind of a supporting bracket for the main top piece. And it slides up and down this way which allows you to get a whole lot, a huge range of motion on it this way.

Then on the end, there's another adjustment over here that allows you to extend the reach out this direction.

Overall the whole thing seems really well built. It's high quality, heavy duty metal all the way around.

It's got metal screws everywhere. Lock nuts. Metal inserts where the screws go in. I can't tell, this is either really high grade plastic or aluminum brackets where all the screws go in and hold everything together. So overall I'm really impressed with the build quality on this.

On the end here, it does have a mounting stud that has both 3/8ths and 1/4 inch studs on it so you can mount cameras... any kind of camera gear on it that uses those two standards.

This stud can be mounted on either side of the extension tube or on the end. And since the extension tube swivels, you can put it anywhere full 360 degrees all the way around. You don't really need to have... put it on both sides because you can swivel the light around. Or swivel the bar around. But you can also put it in the end if you want to.

Overall I'm really impressed with the build quality on this.

So now I need to make a mounting bracket and mount it in the studio and get some real world experience with it.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Logitech C922x Pro stream webcam unboxing, test and review

Description

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.

Buy it: Logitech C922x Pro (Associates link)

Download link for Open Broadcaster Software

For a written transcript, go to Logitech C922x Pro stream webcam unboxing, test and review

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!

Canon EOS 77D unboxing

Description

In this video, Harley unboxes a new Canon EOS 77D. Canon just released their new EOS 77D today and Harley picked one up to supplement the household video capability. This is a short video where he opens the box and shows what's inside.

Amazon associate links:
Canon 77D kit with lens: http://amzn.to/2nP98uJ
Canon 77D body only kit: http://amzn.to/2nP9jGp

For a written transcript, go to Canon EOS 77D unboxing

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

Today we're going to unbox a new toy.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Photographers. Harley here.

My wife just went on a trip taking our one video camera, other than the GoPro here, with her on this trip to shoot some video.

And she want to be doing some YouTube videos here in the near future so we're going to have some contention over the one camera that we currently have.

So today the 77D was just released, on the same day that she left, and so I went down and picked one up.

I figured it was probably a good camera that was... had a good value for the amount of money you have to spend in order to get some decent quality SLR camera and video capabilities.

So this is just going to be a simple unboxing video to see what's inside the box. This is a body only kit so there's no lens with it, it's just the body and a couple other accessories. So let's see what's inside.

Ok, opening the box...

we have a manual,

and a Register Now card,

and some other type of paperwork,

camera strap,

battery,

battery charger,

and the reason for all this... the 77D.

Pretty small. It's about the size I'd expected.

About the same size as my XTi. It has a whole lot more capability.

It's got video. It's got the popout screen. And so we'll see how it works out.

So, that's it for this video. It's really short, really sweet.

Tomorrow I've got to shoot some b-roll for another video I'm working on and I'm going to be using this camera.

I'm also going on a photowalk tomorrow evening so I'll be shooting some stills in the evening, night time, long exposure stuff probably a little bit and just kind of play around with it. See how it works out.

I'll have a video out in a little while after I've run it through it's paces and kind of get some first impressions of it.

Until next time, go make something. Perfection's not required. Fun is!

Tool Review: Zoom H1

Unboxing and initial review of the Zoom H1 digital recorder.

Links to USB charger teardowns:

• Mike's Electric Stuff
  • Crappy PSU analysis
  • Inside a reasonable quality Chinese PSU
• EEVBlog (Dave Jones)
  • Fake Apple USB Charger Teardown
  • Bonus: Watch Dave teardown a Zoom H1 recorder

Credits:

• 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.