A few months ago, I picked up this nifty device called a Stream Deck made by Elgato Gaming. It’s a 15-button USB keyboard with LCD buttons. It’s primarily marketed towards gamers who live stream so they can have quick access to commands and functions as they stream. The programmer in me couldn’t resist trying it out to help us with our production setup.

Using the base software provided, I was able to fairly quickly implement a workflow to allow volunteers to have easy access to buttons that then fire commands on our Ross Dashboard Production Control ecosystem. If you’ve not used Dashboard before, you can read about how we use it at my church here. It’s fairly easy to set up a custom panel in Dashboard that runs an HTTP web server at a specific port, which in turns allow you to “click” a button on the panel by calling that button’s trigger ID remotely via a specific URL.

Using the “URL” method provided in the base software, we are able to make web calls to the Dashboard custom panels to fire the commands. All the logic/code remains in Dashboard, and this just becomes a method of executing those commands remotely via an HTTP request.

We used the base software for a few months without issue, however quickly realized the limitation of not being able to have bi-directional communication between our Dashboard Production Control and the individual Stream Decks. For example, several of our commands act as “toggles”, meaning we can have a few different state options that represent the current status of a device. If I only had one person making changes or operating the system, it wouldn’t be a huge issue. That person would hopefully remember what button they pressed last. However, when there are a lot of moving parts and multiple people controlling systems, the ability to update status on all devices becomes very helpful.

Enter NodeJS. People smarter than me took the time to write a base NodeJS library to control the Stream Deck. I hadn’t written in NodeJS before, but being a programmer, I was ready to learn something new. I downloaded and installed all the necessary libraries, IDE, etc. and quickly whipped up some code using the base library to control our stream decks. In just a few hours, I had something operational and started running it from the command line. I then spent a couple of weeks refining it and now we have a fully functional, self contained app that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux. It’s packaged using the Electron libraries made freely available with the Node platform.

My controller software uses a base JSON file which defines the button structure of the stream deck. This makes it very flexible and expandable as our needs grow as I can just modify the JSON file to change the button structure.

The software then parses that JSON and builds the buttons on the Stream Deck in real time. If a button has a trigger action assigned, the command is sent to the corresponding device. I’ve written support for several protocols, including the Dashboard Web Call, RossTalk (good for sending messages to your Ross equipment), OSC, VideoHub routing, and more. You can even do internal stuff like jumping from one button page to another, changing button images during actions, etc. Each button can support an unlimited number of button actions, which I called triggers.

It also supports defining a set of devices, so if there’s a device you want to send messages to often, you can define the device in a separate file along with its host, port, type, etc. and then only refer to that device in the button structure. That way, if any of those related variables change,  you only have to change it in one place.

The software also runs a basic TCP listener server on a specific port, and this is where the bi-directional communication comes into play. Anytime a command is run on the master Dashboard Custom Panel Production Control, it relays a message to the remote Stream Deck via the TCP listener and updates the state of the button.

This means that we can run commands from any originating location, whether it is the web-based production control (that I’m still developing), one of the remote Dashboard panels that connects to Production Control, one of the Stream Decks (we currently have 2 of them, one in each control room), or even the Master Control panel and every device will receive an updated status.

I also added a “Virtual Deck” option, which allows you to operate the software with or without having a physical Stream Deck attached. You can also choose to have the Virtual Deck operate independently of your physical Stream Deck, so it’s like having two decks in one!

I am making this software freely available to anyone who can benefit from it. My hope is that the local church can make use of this to allow their volunteers to more easily operate tech equipment during services.

It’s currently up on GitHub here: https://github.com/josephdadams/StreamDeckProductionController

I’ve only built a Mac binary, but you can easily package it for Windows or Linux if needed.

I am working on an Editor function right now that will allow you to add/edit buttons without having to write them in JSON, but until then, you’ll have to make do with that option. Here’s a good tutorial on learning JSON if you need help: https://www.codecademy.com/courses/javascript-beginner-en-xTAfX/0/1

If I can help you out along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out!