I’m really feeling ‘invigorated’ about spending some time producing content, whether it be writing articles or filming videos. Part of that was something I was talking with Scott about last week with regards to setting up a camera at the workbench and popping on live feeds whilst we build things. So today I decided to build the contraption in the article image above, a simple set of what could be considered oversized MDF ‘book-ends’ that hole an old broom handle.
The first thing to do was quickly whip up a model in Sketchup. We use Sketchup for all our design these days, and have been doing so for a number of years. Before that we used to design in 2D an crunch everything in our heads, trying to visualise how the kits go together, needless to say it’s much easier using Sketchup. Once the design is finished all the parts are flattened and exported as an .EPS file which we import into Adobe Illustrator to get things ready for the lasers.
This was a pretty easy design and the whole process took around 15 minutes from design to having it setup. I left some space ‘inside’ the holder to place some bricks, so that it had some weight and wouldn’t tip over easily. Using two of these and a broom handle game me something to mount the webcam holder-arm-thingy above the workbench. I used some hold clamps to stop the broom handle from spinning around once the webcam was mounted and it all seemed to look fine!
Once everything was finished it was just a matter of figuring out how to setup a live stream on Facebook and bam! Now I can run a live stream whenever I’m doing something at the workbench … hooray!