A Custom Room Control System
(View a demo here. Access code is 1975).
Here’s a pretty sweet project that I recently finished up and want to share. (I was asked not to use the name of the company that I did this project for in the blog post, but it is an international company that everyone knows.)
There is a 400-seat theater in their global headquarters here in Southern California. It’s a very cool room that was built in the early 90s. Over the course of time, several contractors have come in and added various pieces of gear to their system… by now it was so complicated to run that they were constantly having troubles with it. That’s where this project comes in.
Basically, I built some custom control software that runs all of their video switchers, audio routers, playback devices (Blu-Ray and such), and the projector from a single touch-screen.
The heart of the system is an application called Girder. Girder is the software that sits between the user interface and the gear. It runs all the logic for the system and then sends out the appropriate RS-232 and IR commands to the devices.
The user interface was completely ran through Girder’s web server. It is nothing more than XHTML, CSS and Javascript (I used jQuery). I designed the general layout of the interface, and Alex McLean did an absolutely ridiculously awesome job making it look cool.
As far as hardware, the requirements were pretty minimal. We used a low-power pc from Polywell computers with an SSD drive in it. The great thing about it is that there are no moving parts in the computer, which should mean less support calls for us. There is a Global Cache GC-100 to provide the IR and relay outs, plus an 8-port USB to serial adaptor. For the screen, we used a 15″ Planar touchscreen.
I put up a demo of the interface so that you can check it out here. The access code is 1975. (I haven’t optimized any of it for web and there are a lot of high-res transparent PNGs, so you might experience some delay waiting for images to load.)
All in all, this interface controls 13 pieces of hardware: 4 video switchers, an audio router, projector, confidence monitor, a lighting controller, Blu-ray player, DVDR, a CD deck and a couple relays to turn amps on and off.
Update: Here’s some additional pics.
