A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted through the blog by Tony Perez, longtime staff member at Calvary Chapel in Las Vegas. He asked if I could help their team to control their Roland V-60HD switcher through a stream deck using Companion.
God has given me a heart and passion to be a resource for other churches, so I jumped right in and started reading the TCP protocol specification for their video switcher. The protocol was simple enough, basically just a telnet protocol to send parameters with a terminating character to designate the end of the command.
I had to take a sick day recently to take care of one of my kids who had an ear infection, so while he was resting, I sat down and prototyped a module for Companion to control their video switcher.
Tony and I then set a time to talk on the phone and do a TeamViewer session, and after doing some slight debugging, we had it working!
The protocol is pretty straightforward. For example, with this command:
\u0002CUT;
The switcher will perform a cut between the current on-air source and the preview source. “\u0002” is the ASCII control code “02H” which tells the switcher that a command code is coming. “CUT” is the command , and the semicolon terminates the command.
We were able to implement every video-related operation and some of the system operations that seemed necessary to control remotely from a Stream Deck.
So, with just a few short hours of work, now his team can control their Roland V-60HD video switcher from anywhere on their network! This will be a great help and add to their flexibility.
This was a fun project to get to help with, especially since I had not ever seen or used this particular video switcher before, and I was able to help a ministry on the other side of the country.
Here are some pictures of the module in action!
The module is open-source and part of the Companion project now, so anyone else who has this switcher can jump in and use it too! You can view the module code here.
Greetings,
Would this work for the Roland V-1HD switcher/is there a way to get this working with the V-1HD switcher?
Hello! No, it would not work with the V-1HD, because that particular model does not have ethernet control. You could, however, control it using my midi relay software in conjunction with Companion and a midi connection to your switcher. I’ve heard of others doing this very thing with the V-1HD.
hello, thanks for the tips, by any chance do you have a way to create something for the roland v160-hd?
Yes there is a protocol to allow control of the v160. I actually contacted Roland awhile back to obtain the protocol when I had some free time to create the module but by the time I got it, I didn’t have the spare time anymore. I’m available for hire to write it though. If you’re interested in that, you can reach out to me via the contact form.
yes, can you help?
Yes. Send me an email via the contact page.
italiaeventi2015@gmail.com
Hello, do you think i could control the Roland V-60HD using osc commands from qlab? if so do you have any pointers as to how the sting would look like? great work.
Yes but you would need a translator program in between like Companion. The osc documentation for Companion is included with the app.
Oh so i cannot write a string inside qlab to lets say switch my preview and program? in what way would companion be in between? Thanks
Not if you want to use OSC as you asked. The Roland devices follow a TCP protocol.
In reality i just want to time my cuts to happen at the same time everyday . I am assuming i can do that with Companion? I have not dug into it nor ever have used it. But i will check it out.
Thanks