I would value being able to go to such a gathering. I hope you both enjoyed it!
I would like to do this the oldschool way, just like as if a tape machine track had the stored data. Obviously the SMPTE data will be generated from a computer instead of a tape machine but I see no need to change the protocol from the console end since flying faders in the 80's seemed to work just great on SSL consoles coming from tape machine SMPTE. Perhaps it is worth investigating some SMPTE systems from old tape machines. I will need a schematic. Any advice on which one might be nice to look at? I bet Studer had some good stuff for this. Seeing a schematic would also help me to learn the pinout and nomenclature of the physical connections. Learning about some chips that are designed to help with this would also be a good idea. No idea what chips to look at, besides of course the Arduino and the mentioned SD card.
Just like how a video has a certain number of frames per second, time code is defined by video frames. ( which was pretty much mentioned already ) But the number of frames can vary, depending on the video format. These differences are applicable to SMPTE, because it also varies. There are several types of SMPTE: 24 frames per second (fps), 25fps, 30fps, and 29.9fps (or 30fps drop )
^ okay so in reference to that information I need to pick my fps. 30fps sounds good to me. Any objections or theories on what might be a better choice?
-SMPTE is time that starts at zero. Just like in real time, SMPTE has hours, minutes and seconds. SMPTE’s maximum value is 24 hours, like there are in a day. But there is a difference from our typical imperial time: frames. The terminology came from the broadcast industry. All of these determinations were dependent on the state of the broadcast standard: PAL, SECAM, NTSC, which in turn are based on 50Hz and 60Hz electrical frequencies.
-A system called Bi-Phase Mark is used to code a bit into an LTC signal while LTC stands for Linear Time Code.
- Bi-Phase Mark works like this ( it is also known as Differential Manchester according to Wikipedia ) Differential Manchester in 2 minutes - YouTube
-An LTC frame is 80 bits long.
In SMPTE (or LTC), the receiver counts the moment it receives the first bit of an 80-bit packet as the start of the frame
How are these packets generated?
-SMPTE time is coded by the BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) method. In this method, four bits are allocated for every tenth decimal numeral. In each frame, the first 26 bits are allocated to the time information, followed by 32 bits of user data, and concluded by the synchronization word (the last 16 bits). The synchronization word is used to identify the frame’s boundaries and is always set to: 0011 1111 1111 1101.
That's all I've got for now, and still I have no idea how to put this all together. It still just feels like pieces of a puzzle to me.