Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/783510
25 SO YOU SPLIT YOUR TIME BETWEEN FILM WORK AND PROGRAMMING. DOES THAT MEAN YOU'RE REALLY NOT GOOD AT EITHER? Ha ha, I don't know. Splitting my time that way has the fantastic effect of providing a certain balance to my life. Film work can cause a person to disappear from the rest of the world for lengths of time, but I don't want to stare at a computer screen my whole life either. That said, I wasn't formally trained in either fi eld. I matriculated from a music program at NYU: one that focused on recording engineering but did not translate into the majority of skills I use on set. I have great appreciation for the everyday struggle of continually learning and improving. WHERE CAN WE FIND YOUR APPS AND HOW MUCH DO THEY COST? LectroRM, FreqFinder and Timecard Buddy are all available on the Apple App and Google Play stores. LectroRM and FreqFinder sell for $20 and $30, re- spectively. FreqFinder's TVDB add-on sells for $15. Timecard Buddy is free but will have a paid ad-free version in the near future. ABOUT LECTRO RM SO HOW DOES IT WORK? The transmitter recognizes two audible frequencies as a 1 and a 0, respectively. When the remote is acti- vated, you can hear the tone shift between those two frequencies as the data is communicated. The actual data is only two bytes, but there is some padding and error checking that helps the transmitter know that the data is what you want it to be. HOW DID YOU FIGURE OUT THE DATA BEING SENT? Well, I'm a nerd of sorts, so allow me to explain it in nerd terms. Some of you might remember a thing called Game Genie for popular 8-bit and 16-bit game systems like NES and Super NES. What it did was change pieces of memory in a game to make the play- er jump really high or have more lives. When Code- masters developed it, they had to look at a picture of the memory in the game and see how the memory changes while playing. From there, it's pretty easy to see when four lives turn into three. Looking at the RM remote control sound was like looking at the picture of memory. I could play the control sounds for two different settings and see what parts of the control sound changed. There are other parts to the equation, but most of them, like start and stop bits, still can be fi gured out just by comparing the control sounds to each other. The hardest part of reverse engineering a protocol is usually fi guring out the checksum as it usually takes a lot of guesswork. The remote control tones use a somewhat obscure checksum algorithm that took a while to fi nd. SO YOU HACKED THEIR TRANSMITTER RE- MOTE CONTROL. DOES THAT MEAN YOU CAN MAKE IT DO COOL NEW THINGS? Sadly, no. A few people early on, asked me if I could add features like low-cut fi lter control or incremen- tal gain changes. But the remote just sends a signal. Lectrosonics has to build the interpretation of that signal into the transmitter, which is why not every transmitter supports every tone. ALL OF THIS IS VERY BORING. WAS THERE SOME SORT OF POLITICAL SCANDAL WITH LECTROSONICS? Scandal, no. But I still found it exciting. Lectrosonics has been stellar with me, and I'm sure they would be with anyone else who wanted to create a competing product. Understandably at fi rst, Lectrosonics was cautious about being associated with a product they ANDROID iPHONE