fbpx

ATEM Tally

Open Source Wireless Tally Light
for Blackmagic ATEM Devices

Use a phone or a Raspberry Pi to add tally light to any camera working with your Blackmagic Design ATEM switchers using WiFi or Ethernet—from ATEM Mini & ATEM Mini Pro up to the ATEM Constellation 8K

Automatic Connections

The software will automatically connect to ATEM devices on the network and saving you the trouble of trying to figure out IP addresses

Speedy Updates

Tally updates are delivered to tally clients via web sockets and the delay is comparable to seeing it in ATEM Software Control

Easy Set Up

Set up each camera in less than a minute and there's no cords to trip you over. Best of all, no programming skills required!

What You'll Need

The Base Station

On Each Camera

Raspberry Pi Kits (Optional)

We have created two Raspberry Pi Zero W kits that has all the components ready for you to build your own lights. You can choose from the DIY kit or the fully assembled kit (upgraded Pi Zero W 2 boards).

Getting Started

The Base Station + Phones

If you receive any firewall warnings, select OK. This is to enable the embedded web server to provide push status.

Automatic: If you have only one ATEM device on the same network, it will automatically connect to it after a few seconds.

Manual: If you have more than one ATEM device or the ATEM device is on a different network, you’ll have to go to settings to make your device selection or manually enter an IP address.

  1. Select Web View from the menu to display a QR code
  2. Scan the QR code with your mobile device or enter the URL displayed on the mobile browser

You can pick from displaying all available camera inputs on the ATEM device or displaying a single camera. Tap anywhere on the screen or the specific camera angle to switch between view.

Raspberry Pi

For Raspberry Pi Zero/2/3/4
  1. Open the image file and it should automatically launch Raspberry Pi Imager
  2. Select the microSD card that you want to use
  3. Select the “Write” button; this should take about 5 minutes

Program LED should be soldered to GPIO 17 and any ground pin.
Preview LED should be soldered to GPIO 27 and any ground pin.

If this is the first boot, wait until both LEDs stays on for a few minutes. It will power cycle a few times to set up the device on its own.

Connect to a temporary access point called “atem-tally-config-ap” that should show up on your phone or computer. The password for this access point is “88888888”

Go to the web page http://192.168.88.1:8888 and you can set up the Wi-Fi network that the Raspberry Pi will use.

Once you press submit, the Raspberry Pi will reboot and join your Wi-Fi network.

Sometimes this’ll show up with an IP address of 192.168.88.1 again in the base station. Just unplug the Raspberry Pi and plug it back in and it’ll correctly get an IP address.

Use it for free

The development of this program relies on your donation. This program is developed to support our own production activities. Consider making a one-time donation below if this has helped with your production needs.

Even if you are just using this without a donation, feel free to leave us a message (or pictures) to let us know how it has helped you.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you are able to connect to your ATEM Mini device without using the USB-C connection, and you are also able to stream from it, it means your ATEM Mini device has been correctly configured to work on your network.

Next step is to make see if you can get the Blackmagic Design ATEM Software Control to connect to it as well. If it is able to connect, then both your ATEM device and your PC/Mac are on the same network.

At this point you should have no issues with using this software. If you are still stuck, go ahead and contact us using the contact form and we’d be happy to help.

We aren’t registered on the Apple Developer program, but if there are sufficient donations we’ll go and pay for that. Until then, you’ll have to come here to download any updates.

This should work with all ATEM devices including the new popular ATEM Mini and ATEM Mini Pro products.

If you are encountering issues with an ATEM device, please report the issue to us.

Pretty much any modern phone with a browser should work with this. This has been tested on iOS and Android devices.

iPhone 4 and below does not support web sockets for this to work.

Yes, we love to make sure that technology is accessible for all.

  • For software: Just go into settings and you can choose any of your favorite colors.
  • For hardware kits: We supply alternate color LEDs upon request at no additional charge.

Yes, you can run as many copies of this as you want. You could have an instance running on a laptop for stage monitor and a separate instance running from your control room.

Note that most ATEM switchers have a limit of maximum 5 devices attached to it. Only the ATEM Tally Lite application running on your Mac and PC count towards that limit. The phones and Pi devices do not attach to ATEM directly so you don’t have a limit on number of cameras that can have tally lights.

You can submit an issue on our GitHub project, or use the contact form to let us know.

If you are reporting an issue, please include as much information as possible about your set up.

This commonly happens when it looses connectivity with your wifi router. You can connect your Raspberry Pi by ethernet cable to ensure reliable network communication, or try to lock down your Raspberry Pi to a single SSID.

Keep in mind that your network performance will degrade when you are using this in an auditorium environment if there are many people blocking the signal and phones creating interference.

Instructions below for disabling AP mode (when using the image)

After initially connecting your Raspberry Pi to your wifi network, you should be able to use any SSH client to connect to your Raspberry Pi device. There’s no need to reboot.

On Windows 11, you can simply launch command prompt; on older versions of windows, you can download and install a SSH client such as PuTTY (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html)

On Macs, you can launch Terminal.

You can launch the ATEM Tally app or use your router’s admin console to get the Pi device’s IP address.

Run the following command to connect to your raspberry pi
ssh pi@<insert ip address here>

The default user name is “pi”, and the default password is “atemtally”.

After you get in, you’ll have to run the following commands to disable the access point service:

sudo update-rc.d raspberry-wifi-conf disable
sudo systemctl stop dnsmasq
sudo systemctl stop hostapd
sudo systemctl restart dhcpcd

At this point the wifi settings are saved.

You can run raspi-config or directly edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file to further configure your wireless network, and configure additional wireless networks.

More information on that here:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#using-raspi-config
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#adding-the-network-details-to-your-raspberry-pi

This section contains examples of multiple SSID/password configurations:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#adding-multiple-wireless-network-configurations

After confirming that your device is still attached to the wifi network, you can reboot it to make sure that it automatically reconnects to your router.

Even with no ATEM devices attached, you should still be able to test the connection using the “Identify” command from the software to make the device blink.

No, the Pi Pico is a simple microcontroller without networking hardware so the lowest cost Pi hardware you can use is still the Pi Zero / Pi Zero W.

We are exploring a new software for the new Pico W which has a built-in wifi module and also evaluate it’s wireless signal performance.

The default username and password images are “Pi” as the user, and “atemtally” as the password

Hire Us

Designshift can help with setting up your live stream, tech support, technical oversight, and entire production of your live stream events and meetings.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

“Blackmagic Design” and “ATEM” are trademarks of Blackmagic Design Pty. Ltd. All trademarks are property of their respective owners.