Kenobi

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Kenobi is our award-winning OB-in-a-box Solution (tm), designed to replace the largely unused tom trolleys. Originally envisioned by Robert Walker, it was first built in Spring 2014, and comprised mostly of the analogue equipment that had been replaced the previous term in the HD upgrade. It has since been upgraded several times, and is now comprised of HD equipment.

Versions

Mark I (February 2014 - August 2014)

Kenobi during original construction

Kenobi was originally built in February 2014 ahead of that years YUSU Elections.

Contents

Kenobi originally contained the following equipment:

Mark II (September 2014 - June 2015)

Kenobi received it's first major overhaul during Summer Camp 2014 after acquisition of better equipment. The Mux and the BAL DA were replaced by the V1616 matrix, donated to the society by Michael Chislett. The removal of these resulted in a much improved image quality.

A HP rack mount console was bought on eBay, so that computing peripherals did not have to be carried and connected desperately in order to use OB1. However, the rails it was supplied with were designed for full-depth racks. After much sawing and hammering, the console was finally intalled in the trolley. Whether it can be removed again is yet to be seen.

Late in the Autumn term, two rack-mount multiview boxes were won on an online BBC Television Center auction. In an experiment, the multiview boxes were combined with the pre-existing one to emulate the multiview layout outputted by the ATEM 1 M/E. Despite the resolution, this was a surprisingly usable arrangement, and was left installed.

In preparation for a future-planned digital upgrade of Kenobi, various Analogue-SDI (and vice versa) converters were also bought, with the aim to continue to be able to use the analogue SD cameras with a newer digital mixer. In addition, a spare Blackmagic Intensity capture card replaced one of the analogue cards in OB1. While waiting for enough funds to buy an new mixer, the converters were used at either end of the umbilicals to further improve the picture quality. In early-Summer 2015, ahead of Roses 2015, the SDI-Analogue converters were properly installed into Kenobi.

Mark III (June 2015 - Present)

Following an unexpected windfall of funding from Greg Dyke, Kenobi was rebuilt and upgraded to HD in June 2015. The ATEM 1 M/E Production Switcher mixer bought in 2013 was replaced in the Studio by a newer 4K model, and was reassigned for use on OBs. OB1 was temporarily replaced by Edit 2, which was installed with the Intensity capture card and a Decklink Extreme 3. This allowed for the same machine to both stream/record and output fill and key CasparCG graphics.

With the rebuild, the patch panels were rearranged. The BNC and Comms patches were moved to the bottom to reduced the strain on the umbilicals, while the rest of the I/O patches were raised to table-height. The XLR-4 PDU 'Fan Tray' was put into use for its intended purpose, with the XLRs patched to the same panel as Comms. Meanwhile, a splitter box was made so that the contents of the shelf - all of which run at 5V or 12V - could also be powered by this PDU.

At the start of Autumn 2015, OB1 was rebuilt with newer hardware (an Intel i3 stolen from a teaching PC). It was found at Woodstock that having a single machine handling streaming, recording and graphics caused not only significant performance issues at high load, but is somewhat catastrophic when things went wrong. This, amongst other reasons, led to a single Decklink Duo being installed in OB1. When required, OB graphics is currently being handled by the studio Graphics PC.

Following complete failure of the HP console, it was removed at the start of Spring 2016.

Contents

Kenobi currently contains the following equipment:

  • OB1
  • ATEM 1 M/E Production Switcher
  • TauVT
  • Netgear 24-port switch
  • Wireless Tally (Arduino Mega with Ethernet Shield and XBee)
  • Argosy 14 IEC PDU
  • XLR-4 PDU 'Fan Tray'

Mark IV (Current (as of July 2019))

Following several updates and much bodging of the unit, post roses 2019 the stack is currently in a working form pending further updating planned for the future. Post Roses 2019 the graphics PC was changed as many of the PC units were updated or combined.

There is likely to be a power alteration to bring both OB1 and OB2 onto a 16A power supply system with a 13A internal power distro.

Contents

Kenobi currently contains the following equipment:

  • OB1 STREAM PC
  • OB1 Graphics PC
  • ATEM 1 M/E (old)
  • Blackmagic video hub
  • Netgear 24-port switch
  • Argosy 14 IEC PDU
  • XLR-4 PDU 'Fan Tray'
  • KVM switcher
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