4-series – Kiel the Coder

Multithreaded Programming

In this post, I’m going to explore the different threading options on 3- and 4-series processors. I find it difficult to keep everything straight when working in different Crestron environments, so hopefully this post will be a good refresher when I need it.

SIMPL Tricks: 4-series

If you’re starting to get into 4-series projects but you don’t have actual hardware to test with you can load SIMPL programs targeted for 4-series processors to a 3-series. I’d heard the reverse was true: a 3-series programs should run unmodified on a 4-series. But it looks like for testing purposes, you can also run 4-series SIMPL programs on a 3-series.

Of course, your program would need to be written such that it runs on a 3-series and a 4-series. This is different from the 2-series to 3-series transition where the architectures must have been wildly different.

HTML5 + 4-series

We’ve already run into a couple things we need to be mindful of when using HTML5 and 4-series processors (see HTML5 XPanel for details about licensing and authentication). In this post, my goal is to break away from 3-series sandboxes and SIMPL Windows, so that means we’re moving into the realm of C# and Visual Studio 2019.

VC-4: Websocket-Sharp

The first version of my web console bastardized the Control Concepts module. Since we’re targeting the VC-4, we have unrestricted access to standard libraries that fall outside the Crestron sandbox. In this part, I’ll swap out WebsocketServer.dll for a NuGet package containing a WebsocketServer class instead.

VC-4: Websockets

This post picks up right where the last one left off. I got VC-4 running on an RHEL instance, but now we’re back to some of the challenges that VC-4 brings… like printing to a console window.

VC-4: RHEL 8

The last time I wrote about VC-4, it was still based on Ubuntu 16.04. Crestron released an update around December 2020 that switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. I cut my teeth on Red Hat Linux 5, and once we had faster DSL Internet at home, I tried out a number of other Linux distros like Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, and finally Ubuntu. CentOS is a freely available version of RHEL, and the VC-4 installer claims to support either. So, in late December I decided I would create a new CentOS VM and try out the new version of VC-4.

CP3 vs CP4

I wanted to see how much faster the CP4 is versus the CP3, so I wrote a small benchmark program to count prime numbers between 2 and some number. I’ve added a FINDPRIMES command to the console so I can test a few ways. Here is an example running on a CP3:

findprimes 20
2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19
Found 8 primes in 00:00:00.0005093

After testing each number between 2 and 20, the program found 8 that are prime, and it took 509.3 microseconds from start to finish.

VC-4: Breaking out of the Sandbox

One of the coolest features of the new 4-series platform is Crestron has removed the sandbox environment. We’re now free to use modern tools and languages to develop for their devices! In this post, I’ll walk through how to create a new project in VS2019 for the VC-4.