stoatworks-labs

I'm an AV technician. I write the tools I wish existed. Not a startup. Not a software house. One technician who got tired of the same problems on every job and started fixing them.

Every tool I build starts on a gig, at the exact moment something should have been easier.

What's already out there — free, MIT, no account, no cloud Everything below is on GitHub right now. Not roadmapped. Not "coming soon". Downloadable, buildable, and in several cases already sat on a rack in a theatre somewhere.

Radio mic & RF

RFutils — browser-based RF suite: WWB/WSM/PMSE file exchange, live Shure & Sennheiser monitoring, IM-aware coordination, device programming.

WSM–WWB Bridge — moves coordination data between Shure Wireless Workbench and Sennheiser WSM. Both native formats, reverse-engineered from real exports.

pmse-to-wwb — drop in your Ofcom PMSE licence PDF, get a Workbench import. Because retyping a licence schedule at 40 frequencies a time is not a job.

MicWizard — discovery and monitoring for Shure/Sennheiser receivers, with AES67 metering and local headphone cue.

Video, switchers & streaming

ATEM Overseer — one browser dashboard across a whole fleet of Blackmagic ATEMs, styled after the multiviewer you already know.

ATEM Fleet Admin — provision every switcher at once. Model-aware forms out to loadable XML, or applied live over the network.

animATEM — ATEM control with a software-composited SuperSource preview built from the switcher's own multiview over UVC.

srt-router — a proper broadcast-style crosspoint for SRT. Any number of ins and outs, live-switchable, pure relay, no transcode. NDI too.

flock — fleet management for BirdDog NDI/SRT decoders. Discovery, grouping, batch edits, full settings parity.

caspar-av — a live-events media server front end for CasparCG: screens on a canvas, frame-accurate cues, a trigger grid. Verified against a real CasparCG server.

Show control & audio

SimpleCue — a platform-independent theatre audio cue player. Cues, fades, links, loops, vamps, per-cue output routing, and control in and out over OSC / MIDI / MSC / MMC / Art-Net / sACN. Mac, Windows, Linux, x64 and ARM.

Zero EQ — zero-added-latency parametric and dynamic EQ with external sidechain, band-isolated harmonics, compression and honest metering. VST3 and AU.

Dante-BabelBox — cross-vendor Dante preamp control. Behringer/Midas, Allen & Heath, Yamaha, plus radio mic telemetry, in one place.

Presentation & post

Presentation Commander (server + client) — NDI matrix router, scene compositor, presenter-notes hub, and a proper automation API. With Bitfocus Companion modules for all of it.

presentation-converter — Keynote/PowerPoint/Slides/ODP to PDF with the presenter notes preserved in a sidecar. Hidden slides and all.

PDF Presenter Lite — Now/Next, thumbnails, fullscreen on the second display. Nothing else. That's the point.

Resolve Configurator — builds an entire DaVinci Resolve project from a session CSV. Bins, timelines, media, smart bins.

Resolume Luma Keyer — the FFGL luma keyer that should have shipped in the box.

Infrastructure & odds and ends

System Graft — inject out-of-tree kernel modules into a SquashFS initrd and write bootable media. For when the installer doesn't know about your NIC.

av-launcher — the tray launcher that wraps the web-based tools into proper desktop apps.

nc-filedropbatch — bulk per-session file-drop folders and links from a CSV.

And then there's the hardware This is where it gets interesting, and where your support actually changes the outcome.

One of them is a lighting node. PoE. Daisy-chainable. Four universes of DMX512 out of an ESP32, real RDM, a proper web UI, and a board that's already been through DRC clean and out the other side. Firmware is pretty much built and simulated, hardware is going through its final revisions before ordering sample boards.

Another of them is an amplifier gateway. There is a large, well-respected loudspeaker manufacturer whose amplifiers talk to each other over CAN, and whose IP gateway is discontinued and a bit flaky to say the least. The protocol has been worked out, verified against the manufacturer's own control software, and the firmware builds. Boards are inbound. There is a full bench test rig waiting for them — self-test image, probe-point renders, a bring-up document. The status LEDs are active high, which I know because I checked, which is a sentence containing a day of my life.

I'm not naming either publicly yet. Patrons get told first, get the repos when they open, and get the bring-up in real time — including the parts that don't work.

Why Patreon, and where the money actually goes Let me be straight with you, because the AV industry runs on people being straight with each other.

This is written with AI assistance, and I don't pretend otherwise. I direct it, I specify it, I review it, Working this way has let me actually get projects done — I ship in weeks what would have taken me years — but two myths need killing:

Myth one: it's fast. It isn't. It's faster, which is not the same thing. Every one of those repos represents real hours: specifying behaviour precisely enough to be implementable, reading every diff, and then the unglamorous half — standing a real CasparCG server up under emulation because no native build exists for my machine, sweeping an undocumented object map on a real amplifier to recover control identifiers nobody published, byte-verifying a parser against exports from actual hardware. AI does not do that part. AI is confidently wrong about that part. One of my plugins shipped four releases as the wrong kind of processor because a single-tone test can't tell you what a frequency-selective algorithm is really doing. I found it. I fixed it. I wrote it down so I don't do it again.

Myth two: it's free. It is emphatically not free. Model access is a real monthly bill — currently around [£X A MONTH], and it goes up in the weeks when something big is being built, which is most weeks. On top of that: PCB fabrication and assembly runs, dev boards, test gear, the second unit you buy purely so you can test the thing that only breaks with two units, licences, and the hardware I have to own before I can write software that talks to it. So far that's come out of my own pocket, alongside a full freelance schedule.

Patreon is how this stops being a thing I subsidise between jobs and becomes a thing I can properly resource. Concretely, your support buys:

Model access — so development doesn't stop on the 20th of the month.

Boards and parts — every fab run is real money, and rev A is never the last rev.

Hardware to test against — I will not ship a driver for a device I have never had on a bench. That principle is expensive.

Time — days blocked out for this instead of taken as work.

What it does not buy: the software. Everything public stays public, stays free, stays MIT, stays yours. No patron-only builds, no crippled free tier, no licence server, no telemetry. If you can't afford a penny, use all of it anyway — that's what it's for. The people funding this are funding it for everyone, and that's the whole arrangement.