Homebrew YouTube Award
What’s This?
An image that we made with some pixel crunching and the live subscriber number for our YouTube channel. If you don’t believe me then check our YouTube channel to see if they match.
Why?
When our YouTube channel reached 5,000 subscribers we realised that the Play Button awards that YouTube give out are a long way off - You get a silver one at 100,000 (!). This gave us a good excuse to write some code that generates a photo of an altogether less grand looking, but more informative version.
The clever/useful bit is that because the photo is a composite of images that is generated by code then every time the number changes, the image changes automatically.
How?
It uses the YouTube API to get a subscriber count and Image Magick to generate a composite image of a plaque with the live subscriber count of the channel. Every time the image is reloaded, the picture is created again from scratch using the latest information.
Detail: Stamping Metal Trick
The numbers/text is printed once in black, once in white and once in grey. All three are offset by a couple of pixels. It creates the illusion of stamped metal
So What?
Looking into his led to us making physical versions of the award. That use similar code but on a dedicated device that sits on your desk.
