Episode: 4121
Title: HPR4121: RODE wireless microphones
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4121/hpr4121.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:51:55

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This is hacker public radio episode 4,121 from Monday the 20th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled Road Wireless Microphones.
It is hosted by Clinton Roy and is about nine minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, my first recording on newer microphone.
All right, well, good evening hackers.
My name is Clinton and this is a very off the cuff episode from me just to announce that
I've got a new microphone.
So I just wanted to run through a couple of details of that, make a show, say a little
about the microphone, why I got it, what I had to do with it.
So this is a roady wireless go to setup.
It comes with three little boxes, roughly, roughly you could fit each one of the little boxes
inside a matchbox.
So there are three of these that come with the set that I bought, two of the microphones
that you clip onto your lapel, the third is a transceiver.
So at the moment I've got the transceiver on and I've got one of the microphones on.
I bought this because I'm going to be going to a conference soon and one of the things
that I do try to do at conferences is do interviews with people.
And this is kind of nice in that I can switch these two microphones on, give one to myself,
give one to the person I'm interviewing and I don't have to use a single microphone
and shove it underneath their faces and I don't have to swap the microphone between
the two of us.
The other feature, like the particular reason I've got this model is that each of the two
microphone units actually has built in RAM.
So it will actually record, like if you've got it set up in the mode, which I do, you
can get each microphone to do a backup recording of your presentation.
The regular mode for this set of microphones is to actually treat the transceiver as
a source and plug it into your computer or plug it into your camera as an external microphone.
But it has this lovely mode, which I'm recording this particular episode too.
We can just turn it on, the transceiver is not plugged into a computer, it's not plugged
into anything and it'll record something like 40 hours of voice and later on I can hook
it up to my computer and as a standard mass storage device and just download the waveform
I believe.
So it does have some Windows firmware or Mac firmware.
I didn't have too much fun getting that to work under Linux.
I tried under a couple of different VM products and wasn't having any luck, so I tried
under wine, I tried under open box, eventually I did end up installing like a full Windows
10 install onto a QMU image and that had enough stuff working, such that I could install
the Rody firmware on it.
That let me do an upgrade of the firmware on the two microphones and the transceiver because
the first thing you do when you buy something these days is out of the box you have to upgrade
the firmware because why would they do that at the factory before they send it out when
they can just make the users do that?
And there is a phone app but it does not let you update the firmware on these particular
hardware models.
If I remember the error message correctly, it does look like the Android app lets you
update the firmware on other Rody microphone devices but not this particular model.
So I had to go down the track of setting up a QMU.
I did find a good blog post on how to set up a Windows box on QMU.
It had a few things that seemed outdated so maybe it's a job for me to write an updated
blog post on how to do this, if for nothing else instructions on how to do this in future
when I need to rerun the firmware update.
The other thing that I really needed to use the software for though is to switch on the
recording option.
So out of the box these things do not record to the memory that's built into the
microphones.
So I had to get, I had to update the firmware and then I had to run the software on both
of the microphones to switch on the recording option.
But now that that switched on I can just hook it up as a USB mass device as I've mentioned
before and presumably I can just copy the files and delete the files and I won't actually
have to run that software.
So there's a number of options going forward so I can write that blog post with the updated
details, there were a number of hoops that I found that I did not have to go through
of the blog post I found so things are getting easier over time.
Depending on how in depth I want to go I could potentially one day sit down and install
like a USB listening device and see if I can work out how to work out if there are
any magic packets getting sent to do the configuration on the device.
Like do I need to break any sort of crypto stuff or is it just a straight command like
plugging the device and send a command with a few funky options.
So maybe in the very distant future when I've got no other things on I could try and
work out a pure USB non-windows solution for setting some of these configuration options.
I'm not sure I'd go down the track of updating the firmware I think that's probably a little
bit too risky but you know maybe one day in the future but yeah basically this set of
microphones assuming that it works out okay assuming that it sounds good I'll hopefully
be using these for conferences coming up hopefully as well I'll be able to use it for
camping and stuff like that so if I'm out and about I'll just be able to pull out these
two things, transfer, microphone, a couple of clicks, turn them on, they talk to each
other wirelessly and then start recording something.
So it's much smaller than the current microphone that I'm using so it's much easier to travel
with.
There are two of them so that when I'm interviewing someone it's much easier and it's
got recording memory so I don't actually have to plug them into a computer so all up
it should be much easier to use I think it might even give better recording outputs
and hopefully like increase the number of talks and presentations that I give on HBR.
So that's been Clinton this has been a very off the cuff recording I very much amused
to sitting down and writing out a full script for these things so I'm doing this because
you know it's cool new hardware but you know also because HBR needs more episodes.
So yeah maybe other people can do an episode on what particular funky wireless or what
particular microphone setup that they've got that they enjoy using and what the advantages
are and disadvantages are.
That's it for now, ciao.
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