My church, Fellowship Greenville, has been building a second campus now for a little over a year. It’s been an exciting process. The new auditorium will feature a control room much like what we have at our existing campus.
One of the newer pieces of equipment that we are putting in is a Ross Video UltriTouch HR. It’s a 2RU touch screen computer essentially, running Ross Dashboard. (I’ve written about Ross Dashboard before if you want to read about any of those.) Dashboard is a very flexible program that lets you program very custom interfaces to control your gear. We used it heavily until I started investing a lot of time toward Companion.
Once I knew we were getting one of these, I knew right away that I wanted to be able to use it as a satellite surface for Companion. Taking what I learned from my ScreenDeck project, and my OGScript knowledge (Ross’s flavor of Java/JavaScript that powers the custom panels in Dashboard), I was able to make this:
It was pretty easy to get simple buttons with text on them, and get the colors of the buttons to match Companion button colors. But I wanted the buttons to look like Companion buttons, and that took some work. Dashboard doesn’t have any image editing libraries that I was aware of, so I had to get creative. The image data coming from Companion is base64 encoded 8-bit RGB. I reached out to the Ross staff on their forums and they quickly got back to me with a helpful decoder function. It was similar to the one I had already written to decode the base64 encoded text data that comes from the Companion Satellite API.
Once I was able to decode it back to the binary RGB data, it was “simply” a matter of writing a function that saves these as bitmap files in a folder local to the panel and then changing the style of the button to show the new bitmap image.
And there we have it! I’m looking forward to using this on our UltriTouch as well as the TouchDrive touch screen as well.
The panel supports turning the bitmaps on/off, setting the button size, total keys, keys per row, and of course the IP/port to Companion. The satellite port is changeable on the Dashboard side but is currently fixed in Companion to 16622.
If you’re a Ross Dashboard user and want to tinker with the panel, I’ve made it available via Github on my RossDashboardPanels repository where I have shared some other panels as well.
If you ever need any custom Dashboard panels created (or Companion modules!), I do this for hire on the side to support my family. You can reach out to me via my website, josephadams.dev.