vc4 – Kiel the Coder

VC-4-PC-3 Wi-Fi

We have a customer that will not allow the VC-4 to connect to their corporate network, but there is a guest wireless network that would easily allow the VC-4 to check in with XIO Cloud. I asked Crestron if there was a way to enable the wireless adapter so I could join it to the guest Wi-Fi but was told it was disabled in BIOS.

On the Road… Again

I’m traveling for work for two weeks, so I won’t have access to my normal equipment while I’m gone. It’s probably a good time to update on my previous post about setting up a VC-4 instance using a virtual private server (VPS).

VC4 and SIMPL

I was recently asked if we could get a customer with an old PRO2 upgraded to VC4, probably to support new hardware they wanted to install. Looking at the existing system, there were a couple devices that needed a hardware controller: DSP and lighting control over RS-232, cable TV control over IR, and a Cresnet button panel for basic room functions. I told them we’d need to keep the PRO2 for all the connectivity, but maybe we could get it to talk to a new program running on VC4?

HTML5 Huddle Room

For our first room type, we’re going to program a very simple huddle room. It will focus around a PC-based codec that we won’t control directly. These spaces are typically low-cost and plentiful, but only allow 3 or 4 people to use them.

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: 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.

Tag: vc4