Speaking of the chaotic tinkerer tendencies, I did actually finally invest in a hardware stream controller, basically a more affordable equivalent to Elgato's Stream Deck:
Boost your live streams with the Stream Controller D200. Customize functions easily for gaming, photo editing, and more!
Ordered an open box return unit from Scandinavian Photo, so that was the equivalent of $60. Not too bad, and under half the price of the cheapest equivalent model from Elgato that I could find in this country.
Plan is to use it with OpenDeck, which has plugins to support several brands/models other than Elgato.
Linux software for the Stream Deck with support for original Elgato Stream Deck plugins - nekename/OpenDeck
A look at OpenDeck, open-source Stream Deck software for Linux.
OpenDeck will also work on Windows and MacOS, but the Ulanzi and Ajazz support plugins that I can see offhand are currently Linux only. The Ulanzi plugin devs do plan to add both Windows and Mac support. The need on Linux was just more pressing, with none of the manufacturers doing it.
I do plan to use the deck to make some streaming things easier, but they're not only good for streamers.
What you get is a physical button pad (13 buttons, in this case) that you can set up to easily do pretty much whatever you like on your computer. Launch different programs, control volume for different things, send specific commands, set timers and alarms, you name it. You want physical volume buttons for your media players, or to mute/unmute your mic? It's simple to do that. You want a button pad to play Cookie Clicker on? There is actually a plugin for that. You get the idea.
And AFAICT OpenDeck will let you keep multiple saved layouts to use for different things. It also supports pretty much all the Elgato plugins. (Missing a couple on Linux, apparently because their devs have some kind of beef and the one plugin guy purposely made things difficult. No direct Twitch integration for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
(You can also do more complicated shit, if you want to. I still need to figure out how to properly set up API calls to do shit through Streamer.bot. Because that is the easiest way I can figure out to do things like trigger sending a specific message to chat at the press of a button--since actual Twitch integration is out on Linux. 😒)
Anyway, if you'd like to play around with the idea but don't have a hardware control pad? From the OpenDeck page:
Tacto is a polished alternative to Stream Deck Mobile that's half the price. Take control of any desktop workflow from your phone with the s
Also from the OpenDeck dev, but not actually open source itself because they decided to sell a pro version. I've been messing with that (free tier), and it is pretty cool. You get 6 buttons to work with on Tacto Mobile, and it communicates with OpenDeck over your local network.
Main problem is the phone app has been periodically disconnecting from OpenDeck and needs to reconnect while I'm trying to use it. It also ties up a phone or tablet while you're streaming, if that is your intended use case. My cheap ass also runs DroidCam on the same phone for my stream camera (great quality for the like $15 Pro license!), so that's sort of a problem.
I also kinda wanted more buttons to work with, so a cheapish physical button pad seemed like a reasonable entertainment investment. But, you can totally mess around with phone/tablet remote control without paying a dime.
