A weekend build: a Raspberry Pi that turns any USB webcam into a clean HDMI program feed, driven from a phone or a cheap air-mouse remote. Auto-discovered camera controls, a self-healing watchdog, one-command install. Open source, MIT, v1.0.
This is the short version. The full build story — first light at 2 a.m., the counter-intuitive framerate fix, two dead screens and the lesson they taught, the pivot to a phone panel, and a watchdog that learned to fall back to software decoding on its own — is on the blog.