About a year and a half ago, I shared our project where we were able to gain network control of our Marshall cameras by bridging RS485 over UDP with a Raspberry Pi and a USB to RS485 adapter.
I’m happy to report that it is still working great, week after week. In fact, we recently implemented a second system in our other auditorium, so when we have simulcast services and I want to move a camera over there, it’s still just as easy to shade them remotely.
I have had several people write in and ask specifically how we created the wiring to make this possible, so I drew up this diagram today:
Essentially here, serial is two wires, positive (+) and negative/minus (-). So the cables use the blue/white blue pair of standard cat5/6 cable to make the connections. In our setup, we have wall/stage boxes with standard cat6 jacks that lead to a cat6 patch panel in the rack rooms where we have the raspberry pi located. So we made adapters that allow us to use standard cat6 cables to make all of our connections. We chose the blue/white blue pair as it is data only to minimize any risk of a misconnection or short if it were accidentally used for something else on stage or if someone else plugged in the wrong cable to our adapter.
Hope this helps as you implement in your enviroment!
Tech Ministry 