Hey All,

This week has been kinda awesome and frustrating at the same time.  We had an issue crop up at work that dealt with some legacy app, and it was a part of the system no one had ventured in for a long time.  Needless to say around 3pm today, after a whole week of digging around, we finally had a fix.  Feels good!

I sent the first draft of the first half of my book to the publisher for editing and reviews.  Feels real good!

My buddy Jacob received his Crazyflie nano quadcopter a few weeks ago and has been having a lot of fun with it.  His latest project has been to control it via a Raspberry Pi.  He has been flying it around the office and it’s a lot of fun to play with.  The thing is whisper quiet until you start turning and then it sounds like a humming bird looking for a kill is coming at you.  Again, its a lot of fun, especially with coworkers and nerf guns.

Another frustrating thing happened this week.  I needed to take screenshots of the Raspberry Pi in action playing some games, so I did some research, and it looks liked the best device is an EasyCap DC60.   This device takes input from an RCA jack and goes into your computer via USB, and appears like a webcam with the video.  It also has Mac drivers, which is a big plus.  Now I know there are a lot of fakes out there, and newer models which don’t support OS X, so I went on Amazon, looked for the proper model, and didn’t care that it was fulfilled by a third party.  It was sent via prime and said DC60.  What I got was a piece of counterfeit hardware.

Now, I buy a LOT of hardware from China.  Over the years I have been very lucky about counterfeits.  I tend to not order anything of enough importance to be counterfeited, or its generic enough that EVERYONE makes the same product.  This time I wasn’t so lucky.  I got an Easee Cap DC-60++ that used a utv007 chipset.  This chipset BARELY supports Windows much less OS X or Linux.  The software it came with was also pirated.  I decided I was going to try to get it to work first though, and see if it had any saving grace.

It took two hours but it finally displayed my video in a window.  I was so frustrated.  If you can get your hands on a genuine EasyCap DC60, its supposedly an awesome video capture device.  I’m still on the hunt for one.

Anyways, have a good weekend!

-Shea