Yes, lightning iPads’ USB connectors are wired as “Device” unless you instruct them to be a host via the OTG camera adapter or equivalent.
I make software, electronics and 3D prints to enable people on tiny budgets to hear and record the extraordinary sounds of bats. Big fan of wildlife, of records with prominent guitars and snappy snares, and every second of the 1970s.
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Yes, lightning iPads’ USB connectors are wired as “Device” unless you instruct them to be a host via the OTG camera adapter or equivalent.
It’s really bad luck if you’ve found the one thing that doesn't work :(
Lightning is AFAIK just a small superset of USB, pinned out differently. An OTG camera adapter makes everything work that I’ve ever tested from MIDI keys through audio interfaces and microphones.
Should be fine with the right cable.
I’m postponing my personal International Bat Night until the rain stops.
Nasty weather forcing bat walks indoors is why every bat group needs a Bat Synth. I hope you have better weather for the rescheduled date.
Ahh, bliss - brick walls rather than close-boarded fence. Modern life is rubbish.
Queen never improved on this : www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgz3...
But why would you not want to write code? Writing code is the single best thing, apart from eating cake or watching Barbie.
Griff Mini build : 8 minutes start to finish including hotplate melt. youtu.be/BxvpKR9f3o0
Well, they are ringing the church bells again next door so I just had to bury my head in some Mott The Hoople. The really scary Punch and Judy laughing on the studio version is ACE, but the live version has such fierce guitar work I just had to listen to it twice. www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2r8...
The list as of right now is Did you no Wrong Suffragette City Gudbuy T'Jane You Shook me all Night Long Shanghai'd in Shanghai Broken Down Angel It's nice to SOMETHING post-1977 - thanks Angus - and the golden years of 1972-74 are very well represented.
Now to create a list of of the 10 or so songs I most want to be able to play well, strip out the guitars and dub in some count-ins, and see how it goes.
I'll preface this with I hate AI. Hate it. But I just realized quite how valuable a guitar tuition tool the Logic Pro stem splitter is. Take your favourite song, remove all the guitars, and play along until you get it right. It's amazing. I do really hate that AI occasionally has its uses.
If only they understood the extent to which they are opening the doors for Reform next time around by turning off decent, caring people. Or maybe they do, and they just don't care?
Anna Faris dodged a bullet when this numbskull walked out.
This post would get so much more traction if Brown Long Eared Bat were in its rightful place, on the list. Just saying.
I've now hit 8500 unique downloads of Bat Detector from the iOS App Store. I really want to hit 10k before the end of this bat season but I fear the milestone may have to wait until next year. Unless of course there's a big Australian surge in a month or so ... so, COME ON AUSTRALIA!!!
Great project that needs more support!
But when a LHS is in there but you didn’t hear it at the time due to the pip / bush cricket cacophony, it is SUCH a buzz to review recordings and find it. I always run my sonogram.js tool over each folder of recordings and do a quick visual scan for “rows of staples” and Barbie tick/tock signals.
As all the actual experts say, one should never, ever rely on an automatic classifier. Anything “interesting” requires a closer look and listen in Kaleidoscope. I have had recent exciting records of Greater Horseshoes that I had to reject, sometimes triggered by PIPPYG “antisocial” calls.
Once the Serotines rolled up yesterday evening things got pretty bonkers. Bonus, the BTO Pipeline thinks it heard a Barbie in all this chaos, and having reviewed the recordings I think it’s right. God knows how it spots them at the edge of perceptibility, it’s total voodoo. youtu.be/-Mashes5kJQ?...
Apodemus have exclusive commercial rights to the designs, and in the UK they sell them via NHBS - www.nhbs.com/apodemus-pip... and Wildlife Services - www.wildlifeservices.uk/product-page...
Wiltshire, magical and mystical land of weddings that feature tiny ponies.
This morning there was a wedding at the church next door featuring AN ACTUAL TINY TINY PONY. It was the sweetest thing I have ever seen, ever. Then I saw my first ever Jersey Tiger. Plus the Self Drive Rental Spitfire from the local airfield went over the house this morning. What a day.
It should a) be nominated and b) win every year. Because it is mighty and supreme.
Do you do WiFi calling and texts so that we rural folk can jump on?
I protest most strongly about the absence of the supreme and mighty Brown Long-Eared Bat from this list.
This one is particularly good :) batchat.buzzsprout.com/680561/episo...
So it's not just Natterer's that do the threatening noises while in the hand!! Did it try the whole Exorcist 360 degree neck rotate in an attempt to locate a bit of finger in biting range?!
"They know where you live" has never sounded more threatening.
Stick it on your guitar, 4 built-in kits, 8-bit companded samples, the whole point being the "Guitar body noises" kit to make KT Tunstall / Ed Sheeran / Danish Pete looped noises using just a magnetic soundhole pickup. I'll publish this for folks to build, but THERE WILL BE ZERO TECH SUPPORT.
Maybe “lack of control and finesse” sums it up more than recklessness. It’s more “Mum, I can do fast tight turns too - WHOAH there’s a human head in my way. And a tree. And a church. Yikes!”
This time of year, watching the babies try to shadow their mothers in the air, with all the enthusiasm and recklessness of teenagers driving for the first time, is just brilliant. 15 minutes walking with Bat Detector and Griff gave me Common and Soprano pips, Brandt’s, Serotine, Noctule and 3 foxes!
Tonight's mammal action featured Common and Soprano pips, Brandt's / Whiskered, Serotine, Noctule and 3 foxes in a 15 minute walk around the church yard, down the road and back. In other news, The Old Guard 2 was *terrible*. That ending - did they run out of storage on their SD card and just stop?
I'd better start support Whitby!
This one : www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyU7...
I dreamed a music synthesis technique once, visualising waves in a dream. Woke up and it was still awesome, implemented it, sounded great. I just didn’t realize that Casio had already invented it 30 years previously!
Brilliant evening of bush cricket detection last night. Such a shame that those noisy annoying bats kept butting in and ruining my recordings ...
Did he just look cool and twiddle with the settings of his deck chair?
Done! 4 sampled kits of 8 drums. Hard Rock, Linn, 808 and Latin, which probably needs a tweak - clueless about that genre. The 2 LEDs indicate the kit, binary coded, the little pads are previous kit / next kit. Hard Rock incorporates my synthetic “Glitterclap”. Guitar goes in, output goes to looper.
If it’s natively iPad rather than a stupid zoomed-in phone app, yes.
In case anyone cares, it's basically a pipistrelle bat detector with the mic removed and more touch pads. Actually, it's more like a Bat Synth with more pads. It's just a Raspberry Pico, some code and some Rs and Cs plus 2x 1/4 jack sockets and 2x slide switches.
I've been quiet on the bat front for the last month because I've been coding and building a drum machine to use with a looper pedal. Guitar goes in, guitar or drums comes out, selected by a switch. 3 sampled kits, 1 modelled. Build cost under £10. No support will be provided, at all. So don't ask.
The loud echoey clanking at the beginning - which sounds like a bad horror movie "zombie chains rattling in dungeon" sound effect - is my keys opening the the front door. Bats already calling as I open the front door. Cool or what?
Here's 20+ minutes of bat joy from just over a week ago, 9th July - there were newly-fledged pipistrelle pups flying with their mothers, brief flashes of myotis, and a bunch of Serotine action to finish off, all with simultaneous 16x time expansion and heterodyning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kflP...
An example - detector tuned to 50kHz. Bat calls at 52kHz - detector emits 2kHz. Bat drops to 51kHz - a gentle bluesy bend of 1/3 semitone - the detector drops to 1kHz. An octave! It seems sane - the bat dropped 1kHz, so did the detector - but the result does NOT preserve harmonic relationships.
It's a direct result of heterodyne detection performing a frequency subtraction, which is inharmonic. A tiny shift in pitch by the bat - remember pitch is about RATIOS - results in a HUGE shift in pitch by the detector. The detector slaps and bangs, but the bat just did a graceful swooping whistle.
Here’s what bats ACTUALLY sound like if you slow them down 16x.
None of them - it’s the bat detector that makes that sound. Bats sound just like birds, but higher-pitched.
Anybody watch Ironheart? If so, quite how did she make that Iron Man suit out of a 1971 Plymouth in 8 hours flat using only the resources of an abandoned auto shop? I know Marvel shows inherently require more or less suspension of disbelief, but really ... that was just daft.
I claim my prize.
Brown Long Eared bat?
Wildly exciting batting yesterday evening. Newly-fledged common pips on the wing, flying in crazy tight circles with their mothers, inches from our faces, tons of feeding buzzes. Plus a pair of Serotines - loud! - low and slow in the gloom. And a bonus prize of a fox in the field next to the church.
Serotine outside the front door last night, and so close above my head - 4 feet ish - it was clipping harder than Roger Taylor's drumming on Sheer Heart Attack. But had it not been so close I would have struggled to see it, lots of tree cover and getting dark at almost half past ten last night.
p.s OBVIOUSLY joking about the cavemen. Because honestly, no matter how hard you try, sometimes the auto scanning just decides that your jangling car keys are a bat. And if you have 6 species around your head at once, it's nice to pick out just one without the phone doing bonkers frequency-hopping.
When it's auto scanning, a quick tap in the sonogram window (the big one in the middle) will freeze at the current auto frequency. Another tap returns to auto scanning. Touch and drag lets you manually tune, and stay manually tuned until another quick tap unfreezes to return to auto scanning. Easy.
This one really is the last update. Manual frequency override! So you can turn your awesome auto-scanning, time-expanding, full-spectrum recording iPhone into an old-school manually tuned detector, just like the cavemen had back in the 1990s. It's like a heritage rock act, but for bats.
A new one for me - Box Tree Moth.
This is the final update in the current round, so let me know if there are issues. Changes - sensitivity and signal strength now reported in dB, added visual feedback on the current filename being written. If nobody raises issues this will go on the store, then no more updates or fixes for a while.
Our village is down to less than half the swifts we had last year. Butterflies are up though, and I’ll take any little positive right now.
This lovely scarlet tiger emerged in the garden early this evening.
Take *THAT* you stupid time expansion bug.
The next build of Bat Detector in TestFlight fixes a bug that I've failed to find for months, plus it has a big improvement in the visual legibility of bat calls in the time-expanded window - top old (YUCK), bottom new (GREASY!). Not yet available, not yet passed Fruity Review. Give it maybe 3 days.
Whoah. That is BRILLIANT!
Go Get 'Em Gavin!
Maybe you can tell I'm a touch impatient because of the number of stupid cable questions I've had to answer and the number of stupid "Why doesn't it work? I bought the right cable" problems I've had to diagnose over the last few months. Bat fans who are cable challenged - this one's for you ❤️
Bat Detector is now at 6500+ downloads 👍😀 Roll on 10,000 and roll on tons of sales of the Apodemus Pipistrelle Mini, the thinking bat fan’s combo bat detector / ultrasonic USB microphone. Plus, every Pip mini sold makes money to support development of the @btobirds.bsky.social BTO Acoustic Pipeline.
They don't know it yet, but they are going to grow up GORGEOUS!
That took me about 45 seconds. I'm getting old.
June 10th, 2 days after they fledged, and our baby blackbirds really looked like toddlers. All fearful glances, and keeping out of sight. 11 days on and they look like teenagers, bold as brass, charging about the garden like they own it, then begging daddy for lunch because they can. Brilliant!
DUDE! Thank you for introducing me to the Shelby / Pratt!
MAKE. THIS. MOVIE.
It must be really nice to be able to present in your native language :)
Just realized the “big Raven” is also a baby, which does explain its behaviour - sitting in the tree, calling, expecting dinner to just arrive.
Big Raven, little baby Blackcap - my first ever 😀
Steve Jobs would have thrown every single one of these iOS 26 design features straight into the bin.
I am rapidly running out of Murderbot books.
It seems simple enough - were I an evil, penny-pinching state with an eye exclusively on snuggling up to big business, ignoring the plight of the poorest citizens and just caring about the bottom line, I’d say it costs too much for the state to let people live beyond 90, so just let them die.
That’s the easy solution stone dead then.
Is it parasitized by Yellow Rattle?
Anyone in or near Somerset wanting to build their own Bat Detector? Somerset Bat Group are running several workshops this Summer : somersetbat.group/advice/which...
This is insanely great.
Yes, we are now (North Wiltshire) as of two nights ago beyond 9.30 p.m for first bat activity, after 10.00 for the first Myotis / non-pipistrelle, but it depends on temperature and light level. Under tree cover where it's darker they may be out and about not long after 9.00.
So, did you manage to hear / record any bats?
External mics are definitely a good idea, SD cards generate ultrasound when they are writing, so physical distance between mic and SD card is good.
Now you need to hot glue a 38mm brooch pin to the back x they are designed to be soldered on during the hotplate process.
External microphone. No clue what the pinout is!
GSW mum feeding baby in the churchyard just now.
I *really* hope this is true ... www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
Kestrel hanging out on the church. The jackdaws repeatedly flew at it, it just didn’t care. It stayed long enough for me to grab a camera from the house and get a photo, decide I could do better then grab another, zoomier camera, and get this photo.
Bluetooth-capable Bat Detector on TestFlight - let me know how this goes, it may need a clean reinstall. New in Settings -> Bat Detector : Timex 16x / 10x / 8x Volume sliders for hetero / timex "Force speaker" - OFF for Bluetooth Must update user manual ... testflight.apple.com/join/M5R8kipW
I just managed to get Bat Detector to work with Bluetooth output for the first time, so you can now go batting while wearing AirPods. No more disturbing the neighbours with weird slapping and peeping sounds. Will put onto TestFlight soon.
Today's bat news - just saw a bat out of the window, and we have fresh pipistrelle poo on the car from last night. yay!
Listen up! It is baby bat season! Please, please, please keep your cat indoors overnight for next few weeks. Seeing multiple cat-damaged or killed bats, some with babies attached.😪 Bats can live >20 years and have just 1 baby/year, so now's a critical time. # bats #cats #conservation #wildlife 🦇
I'm loving Murderbot, but the episodes are a) VERY short and b) a whole week apart. When the season ends I'll just have to watch them all again back to back.
OK, clearly I have some TV catchup to do. But to be fair I did see him in Kimmy Schmidt and Keeping up with the Joneses.
I do. But never saw it, from the promo photos I just assumed he was devilishly good-looking guy, rather then premium acting chops guy. Did I misread the promo shots?
Yes, not only is the show brilliant, but he has successfully moved beyond “Terribly good-looking guy” into a truly great dramatic / comedy actor. The whole thing is wonderful, every single cast member is so good.
