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 … Continue reading VC4 and SIMPL
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. Keep It Simple Huddle Room design is easy: keep it simple, keep … Continue reading HTML5 Huddle Room
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 … Continue reading HTML5 + 4-series
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. Better Logging Control Concepts has an excellent Websocket Server demo available on the Application Market. If you open … Continue reading VC-4: Websockets
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 … Continue reading VC-4: RHEL 8
In this part, we'll work on adding the NVX devices into our program. Let's review the overall design real quick to see what we have left: We have 3 encoders and 3 decoders that need to be added: EncodersCamera - 1Laptop - 1Video Codec - 1DecodersDisplay - 1Video Codec - 2Camera InputContent Input Make sure … Continue reading VC-4: Part 4
In the last part, we got an XPanel connected to our VC-4 room and made it change state a little. We aren't going to add much in this part, just a few changes to make things a little nicer for us. The first problem you might have noticed is when the XPanel first opens, the … Continue reading VC-4: Part 3
In the last part, we got a program loaded to our VC-4 server, started it, and that's all it did. This time, we're going to add an XPanel so we can interact with the system. Starting from our template, let's add the following lines to get an XPanel connected: using System; using Crestron.SimplSharp; using Crestron.SimplSharpPro; … Continue reading VC-4: Part 2
I'd like to write a program that explores VC-4 since it's the only 4-series platform I'll have access to for a while. And since VC-4 doesn't run the logic engine, we get to program the whole thing in SIMPL#! Here's a rough drawing of how this system will function: Conceptual drawing of our conference room … Continue reading VC-4: Part 1
I started to write a series of posts about programming on Crestron's VC-4 platform, but realized I should probably back up and document how I got my VC-4 instance running. The first thing I did was create a new virtual machine in VirtualBox: I wasn't sure about memory requirements, but figured 4GB should be OK. … Continue reading VC-4: Part 0
Kiel the Coder 