Despite being able to use your smartphone or tablet together with an additional accessory as a teleprompter, you can also build your own and adapt it according to your needs with a larger or better screen. How? Well, how could it be otherwise, with one of the development boards that we like the most. This is the Raspberry Pi Teleprompter.
What is a Teleprompter
Teleprompters are devices that allow you to display text at a speed and with a variable font size to make it easier to read. All this while looking at the camera in a normal way, because said text is reflected on a glass placed in front of the camera’s lens. So there is no sense that the person speaking to her is reading anything.
Well, these devices that for many years have been very popular in many television programs, especially in the news, can be easily obtained today by anyone interested in them. What’s more, there are options for practically all prices and needs.
For example, there are professional teleprompters that already incorporate their own large screen so that reading when the camera is away from the user is easy. There are also smaller and more basic ones that rely on the use of a mobile phone or tablet to reflect on a glass what the screen of these shows through a teleprompter application.
The latter, the application, is something very necessary so that when it is reflected on the screen it is seen correctly and can be read. This means that the text should be displayed inverted on the screen.
How to build a teleprompter with a Raspberry Pi
If your needs are basic and you don’t need much in terms of screen size, you can use your smartphone or tablet and you would already have a teleprompter system with which to record your videos more easily, without having to learn a text by heart to say about fluid form, without using taglines or anything, at least at the beginning when you have less fluency speaking to the camera.
If, on the other hand, you need a larger screen or you simply want to assume the creation of your own, pay attention to this Teleprompter based on a Raspberry Pi. Thanks to the use of a 3D printer and different components, you can create your own and adapt it to your needs easily just by updating or changing some of them.
The teleprompter built with a Raspberry Pi makes use of the following:
- Raspberrry Pi 4B
- 3 touch buttons
- Adafruit Perma-Photo Hat
- Adagruit TFP401 HDMI / DVI Decoder
- 5 ″ TFT screen
- HDMI to micro HDMI cable
With all this, the basic thing is to create a structure for the teleprompter suitable for the hardware to be used. That means that if you are going to use a screen with a diagonal of more than 5 inches, then you would have to create a structure with a glass suitable for that size so that the reflection of the text is complete.
In this structure, the most important thing of all is that the screen is perpendicular to the objective and the glass where it will be reflected at 45º . From there, if you already have all this ready, the next step is to configure the Raspberry Pi so that it can run the necessary teleprompter software and control the different elements when displaying the inverted image and allow the user to control the progress and backspace of the text. Because that is the important thing, that you can do at your own pace so that the reading is fluid and natural.
In Tom’s Hardware there are all the step-by-step instructions that you will have to carry out using terminal commands to be able to carry this project to fruition. To configure that the video signal that is displayed is done correctly.
Thus, after an entertaining afternoon, you can have as a result what you see, a device that can make recording much easier both at the beginning and later, because the use of these accessories is not at odds with being an experienced or novice content creator.
