Elgato Stream Deck Integration

V-Control 4 now support Elgato Stream Deck to fire tasks and control the playlist.

Have you always wanted an inexpensive universal keyboard with freely assignable keys for V-Control? With keys that can be individually labeled and backed up with images? Then the Elgato Stream Deck is for you. For about 150 Euro you get a keyboard with 15 free assignable buttons.

Individual keys can also act as folders and display additional key layouts. Thus you are not limited to the 15 keys. Elgato provides a more or less comfortable software to assign the keys.

The connection to V-Control is made via the TCP_StreamDeckConnector, which can be downloaded in the download area. The TCP_StreamDeckConnector takes commands from the Stream Deck and forwards them to V-Control via a TCP connection. V-Control must be in remote mode (Configure->Options->RemoteMode->TCP).

Be sure that the Enable TCP Remote Service box is checked.

In Elgato’s Stream Deck software, the buttons are assigned an Open / Launch command. This command takes a file name from the program to be executed as a parameter. The TCP_StreamDeckConnector is selected here. Parameters must then be passed to it to determine which task is to be executed or which playlist action is to be started.

Read the full manual at Elgato Stream Deck

Kissboxes now available at V-Control’s Shop

Many of you may know them, but for those who don’t here is an explanation what Kissboxes are and how they work.

In general, Kissboxes could be described as gateways. They have an Ethernet connector to communicate with the control software on one side, and a second interface to control devices. This second interface can be a MIDI, DMX or LTC interface. Kissbox offers digital and analog IO’s as well.

Depending on the type, Kissboxes support a number of control protocols such as Art-Net, RTP MIDI and Telnet.

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V-Control 4.0.6 and TCP Art-Net Connector

Today we released V-Control 4.0.6 and a new TCP Art-Net Connector. The TCP Art-Net Connector is a software that controls up to 256 Art-Net universes on the Art-Net side, and has a simple TCP ASCII interface on the V-Control side.

In V-Control we have new standard device variables that show the channel status and the last command string that was sent to the device

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V-Control 4.0.4 now with MIDI Support for Standard (USB) MIDI Interfaces and Art-Net

 New in V-Control 4.0.4

  • GUI: Message shows “Not in Run Mode” if a task is started without being in Run Mode
  • GUI: Added Toolbar Button for Countdown Window
  • GUI: Toolbar now shows correctly on High DPI Screens on Windows
  • IOManagaer: IOMan.OnTimerSendAction: if Globals.EnableEvents = False then remove all
  • ioCommands IOManager: Incomming Data is now buffered before processd. The Buffer is read by a timer triggered function now.
  • ScriptManager: Endless repeats don’t let System hang on Stop (Added “If Cancel then return” to Interpreter.bas)
  • New Driver: Onvif TCP Connector
  • New Driver: Art-Net
  • New Driver: MIDI TCP Connector

We have now basic Art-Net support. The main usage of then V-Control Art-Net driver is to trigger other devices. It is also possible to use the driver to have DMX output if an Art-Net node such as Kissbox DMX1-TR is used.

V-Control Connectors

For some devices not direct accessible by V-Control, we provide Connectors. A V-Control Connector is a piece of software that controls the device native and provides a Interface (typically UDP or TCP) to connect to other software products such as V-Control.

So the V-Control Connector does all the communication with a device internally and provides a simple control protocol via network to communicate with V-Control. This also has the advantage that devices not available via network now are network controllable. The V-Control Connector is running on a computer where the device is connected to (typically via USB). This can be the same machine where V-Control is running, but doesn’t have to.

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V-Control 4.0.3 on Raspberry Pi

Unfortunately, V-Control 4 looks ugly on Raspberry Pi’s Pixel desktop. But we have a solution for that. Use Ubuntu Mate https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

In Addition, we provide an image with Ubuntu Mate and V-Control 4 pre installed. The image is produced with a Raspberry Pi 3, so you need that device. To use this image, a 16 GB SD card is needed. Download the image from here:

Icon
V-Control 4.0.6 Raspberry Pi Image 2.2 GB

Then unzip the file. This will need some time because it is a 16 GB image, so please be patient. After unzipping, copy the image to a SAD card. To do that you can use dd command on Linux, for example

Replace the path to the image with your local path, and also replace /dev/sde with the path to the SD card.

On windows you can use a tool such as Etcher https://etcher.io/. Etcher is also available for Linux and Mac.

 

 

 

V-Control 4.0 Beta for ARM 32 / Raspberry Pi released

Today the promised Raspberry Pi version of V-Control is available for download. Please keep in mind that the power of a Raspberry is much less then a core i CPU.

The main application for V-Control for ARM should be small projects that require a low-cost platform and small form factor.

We also released the first Beta of V-Control 4.0 64 Bit for Linux. It was tested with Ubuntu 17.10 and Linux Mint 18.3, but should run on all distros with GTK3 support.

We are still looking for volunteers that help us testing the MAC OSX version. At the moment we assume that there is not much interest in a MAC OSX version, because nobody want’s to help us yet.

V-Control 4.0 Beta for Windows released

Today we released our brand new V-Control 4. The first release has beta status and is available for Windows 64 Bit only. Other platforms will follow, including Raspberry Pi.

New in V-Control 4

  • We implemented the concept of device variables. A device variable represents the status of a device, for example the time code position or power status. If one of those variables changes, an event is triggered. This event can handled by a task.  To request status messages from connected devices, the V-Control device driver send commands periodically and ask for status changes. This can be up to every 20 Millisecond. The answer is automatically processed and stored in the device variables.
  • Now two or more tasks can access the same device. V-Control buffers all commands and fires them if the device is free. This was necessary because of our new GUI designer and the concept how it works.
  • New Platform Raspberry Pi. V-Control 4 is prepared to run on Raspberry Pi. We’re really looking forward to the beginning of next year when we launch V-Control on this exiting platform.
  • Saving Projects is now processed by a separate Task, allowing to work during saving.
  • Save Increment saves Projects and automatically adds an incrementing number. So saving “MyProject.vc4” leads to “MyProject_001.vc4” saving that again leads to “MyProject_002.vc4” and so on.

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Super simple and Cheap Android Touch Interface Part 1

As some of you might know there is a build in web server in V-Control that lets one create graphical user interfaces for V-Control. But to do this, HTML and JavaScript knowledge is necessary. In this article, I will describe a simple solution using an Android device, a cheap Bluetooth serial port and a V-IO interface. The V-IO is not really necessary, a simple Arduino Uno is sufficient, but with V-IO we also have a housing for the Arduino. Read more

Touch GUIs with WebSockets

One of the new features of V-Control 3.7.14 is the ability of the build in web server to handle WebSockets. This allows us to establish a stable, bidirectional connection between a web application and V-Control. The benefit of a bidirectional connection is, that our web application does not have to poll the V-Control web server to get status changes. As far as a status change of a device occurs, the information is sent to the web application. All we need is to write a handler for this status message and show the new status in our GUI.

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