Tablet-Powered OBS Light Board
In the current state of the world with COVID-19, it has become increasingly difficult to travel and go to studios where high-end technology may exist, such as professionally built lightboards. If you are a hobbyist and love DIY projects, you can absolutely make your own at home for a few hundred dollars; however, one of the biggest drawbacks of a real lightboard is when you need to do LIVE broadcasts! Why? It is MESSY! If you are perfect, and don’t make a single mistake with your drawing, perhaps not; however, for the rest of us, sometimes you will make a mistake, draw a box too small, need to re-trace an arrow, etc.. On a physical lightboard, this creates a nightmare with trying to carefully erase what you drew without smearing the neon dry erase marker over the rest of your design. For this reason, the physical lightboards are best suited for video creation where you have plenty of options for edits in post.
This is why I wanted to come up with a better way to do a LIVE lightboard’ish stream where you are achieving virtually the same net effect without all the expensive hardware, and with the beauty of technology, you have the beloved UNDO button to save the day! Further, I will show you a way with the application I leverage to build out layers. Layers are an amazing way to tell a story on the lightboard in stages. You can pre-draw some of the basics on a few layers.. Let’s say part 1 you layout the infrastructure basics, or whatever you are presenting on.. This is your starting point. You then have the ability to freehand on a new (blank) layer where you can easily hide it when you are ready to bring in your second pre-drawn layer to continue the story! This is simply amazing and not possible on a real lightboard. Pre-drawing IS possible on a physical lightboard, but it’s a one time thing for live sessions. Once you go live, that’s it, whatever you had on the board is what you start with, everything else will be ad-hoc.
If you are interested, have a look at the video tutorial I put together that walks you through exactly how to create this yourself, all for $19.99!! This will require you to BYOD, but after that, the only software license you’ll need is, indeed, only $19.99!
AirServer For Windows 10 x64 Universal (Recommended)
Open Broadcaster Software (OBS)
