claud9999 / lutoc

Linear Timecode Generator for ESP32

This is a starting point of the LuToC firmware. Project at https://hackaday.io/project/25934-lutoc-linear-time-code-smpte-ltc-generator

This software is CC0 licensed, public domain for commercial or non-commercial use. Credit and community feedback and contributions are certainly appreciated.

Hardware: This is written for the Sparkfun ESP32 Lora Gateway board with the Sparkfun RTC RV-8803 daughter board connected via a Qwiik connector.

lutoc's Issues

set RTC from NTP

When NTP is sync'd, set the RTC clock.

do we need to sync with "black burst"?

With NTSC analog video, timecode was encoded outside of the visible frame in the "black burst" section of the transmission (if you played with vertical hold on your analog TV, you would have seen a row of black + white boxes that were clearly a binary digital clock).

Needless to say, I don't believe digital video non-linear editors will expect the LTC to be synced to align exactly at a particular time when the frame is recorded. For example, if you're recording 25fps, clearly there's a lot of audio that is recorded between each frame of video. However, there's only one timecode recorded for each frame, so if the timecode is recorded with a fair bit of "slop" on both sides of the video frame, what does the NLE do? I'm sure if you're that pedantic, you can shift your alignment one frame left/right but it'd also be easy for an editor to miss and the audio would be off by a frame.

Clearly the LuToC system will need an input source to indicate the start of a frame but I don't know if that's standardized and how many cameras actually send out a frame sync signal.

Thoughts?

add LoRa networking

LoRa is perfect for maintaining sync between devices; a simple broadcast architecture should be developed.

generate LTC signal

display?

Should we support a display? e-paper, LED, LCD, ? e-paper is probably the most sensible (low power, no need for high update frequency) but is pricey (~2x LED.)

Similarly should this have inputs? A design of the user interactions would be worth looking into...