Posts by Nick Jackson

It’s weeknotes time again!

Bells on a big screen

We want people in the church to be able to see what’s going on up the tower for tomorrow’s open day, so we borrowed the big screen from the Community Centre.

To make this work we used OBS Studio (formerly used at Whitkirk to handle service streaming before we bought our new equipment) to pull in the video streams from both cameras and combine them into a single picture-in-picture view of both what was happening in the ringing room, and what was happening in the belfry.

A pretty quiet week, perhaps surprisingly given that this week saw a huge change in Coronavirus regulations.

Moving microphones. Again.

We shifted our choir microphones forwards, to pick up our newly expanded cohort of singers. Picking up and distinguishing the many sources of sound in our building can be tricky, so we’re constantly reviewing how all our microphone arrangements work.

Getting the video where it needs to be

Last week we did a lot of work to install camera equipment in the tower. This week, we started working on things to display the video where it’s needed.

We’ve got a couple of Raspberry Pi miniature computers which are perfect for this kind of thing, so we installed some software called VLC on one, which can connect to the video streams from the cameras.

On the day this will be on a much larger screen, but everything in testing worked exactly as planned.

This week we’ve mostly been up in the tower. As we mentioned last week, we’ve been getting things in shape for the YACR Open Day on 1 August. Buckle up, this is a long weeknote.

Let’s talk about the tower

Most people have never seen the inside of our tower. From the outside, it’s quite difficult to imagine what’s up there. Even when you’re inside, from the staircase it can be difficult to figure out exactly which floor you’re on. Fortunately, in one of our history booklets, there’s a lovely line drawing that can help people picture things.

The ground floor is pretty boring, full of cupboards with things like gas meters and electrical distribution panels. On the first floor, our organ. The second floor is what’s known as the “ringing room”, and this is one of the two places we’ve been busy. The third floor is known as the “clock room”, and holds the mechanism which drives our church clock. Up on the fourth floor is the belfry, holding our three bells. Finally, the roof.

Getting between all these floors involves a pretty narrow staircase and in some cases an unexpectedly large step. As you get higher these steps are also very uneven, and occasionally not lit as well as they could be, so climbing past the first couple of floors without a reason is generally discouraged.

Fortunately – or perhaps, unfortunately depending on your point of view – the tech team have been tasked with making sure people can see what’s up the tower without making the climb themselves. So, without further ado, here’s what we’ve been up to.

This week has mostly been spent up the church’s tower, moving equipment and planning for upcoming events.

Bong

In readiness for the YACR Open Day, we’ve been up the tower to plan ways to get video from our belfry and ringing room to other places in the building. We’ll have a full write-up of this when we’ve installed it, but we’re having to install some temporary power, lighting, networking and screens in various places, with plenty of climbing up and down a narrow spiral staircase.

Moving the wireless bridge. Again.

Although we moved our wireless bridge in April, we were never quite happy with its positioning. The signal was great, but it was potentially in the way for people climbing to our belfry. With an open day coming up where more people would be using this space, and with plants to regularly ring the bells, we decided to move it again.

The new location keeps the improved signal quality (and even improves it very slightly), but means that both the wireless bridge and the cabling are now well out of the way. The only downside is that if you know where to look you can now see the bridge from the outside of the building.

Offsetting our carbon

Our Energy Footprint Report highlighted that we could do better with offsetting our emissions, so along with the Church as a whole looking at offsetting our day-to-day usage the Tech Team are trying to offset all our equipment purchases. Because we’ve bought some new equipment for the YACR Open Day, we’ve offset our emissions and planted some more trees.

Because we also like clever uses of technology, our Green Whitkirk page also automatically updates the number of trees we’ve planted and the amount of carbon we’ve offset.

Debugging some software problems

We’re currently experiencing a problem with the software controller for our video mixer, which means we can’t easily access some of the features we normally use. We’re still in the process of getting to the bottom of this.