Controlling a NEC NP400 beamer with the serial object
I'm an dutch artis and I'm working on an interactive video-installation. I want to capture high-quality video with the jit.grab object. Everything is work perfect, but when I'm capturing I want to switch the beamer to the video that is comming directly from the camera, so that people can see themself during the capturing of high-quality video.
My beamer has an PC-Control with a D-SUB 9 connector for RS232 communication. Something I dit before, but this time I have a little problem. I don't understand how I can convert the data code needed for the beamer to switch in MAX. I thing these are HEX data codes, but how do I make a message in MAX to put in the serial-object so that my beamer understands them?
Beamer-manual (PC Control part) see Image...
I hope there's someone who can help me. Thanks anyway.
Quote: LUC wrote on Sat, 24 January 2009 06:36
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> I'm an dutch artis and I'm working on an interactive video-installation. I want to capture high-quality video with the jit.grab object. Everything is work perfect, but when I'm capturing I want to switch the beamer to the video that is comming directly from the camera, so that people can see themself during the capturing of high-quality video.
>
> My beamer has an PC-Control with a D-SUB 9 connector for RS232 communication. Something I dit before, but this time I have a little problem. I don't understand how I can convert the data code needed for the beamer to switch in MAX. I thing these are HEX data codes, but how do I make a message in MAX to put in the serial-object so that my beamer understands them?
>
> Beamer-manual (PC Control part) see Image...
>
> I hope there's someone who can help me. Thanks anyway.
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Can you get anything to come out of the serial object in its help file? Can it actually connect? Once it's connected you should be on your way---just use a [print] to see the various values coming out, then a [route] to get to the data you want. Possibly you will need to trim some lists of data [zl slice or zl ecils], or convert from HEX if you want it more readable (single numbers can go into number boxes set to display Decimal, and if it's a list, you'd unpack or use iter). Going back to the beamer would be similar but there may be some formatting specifics to tweak for it to understand what you want.
A workaround might be to have whatever else you're playing (not the live video) in a window that's projecting, then when you want to switch to Live, a different window comes to the front (thispatcher help file for these commands). This way you could control the switch within Max only. Hopefully I'm understanding the setup?
Interested to hear if you can get it working!
Thanks for your reaction. It's the formatting towards the beamer where I get stuck. The beamer doesn't send anything so that I can use that information and I don't understand the table in the manual.
The videoswitch is because when you capture video in high quality, max isn't able to show the same video real-time in another window. There's the preview function of the jit.grab object, but this produces a frame every 2 seconds or so. When the computer is capturing I switch the video signal to the beamer from the computer video-out to camera video-out so that my audience see themselves and the computer can capture the same video in the background.
Normally speaking, what you should do is convert the hex numbers to int and feed them directly to the serial object. I made an abstraction for the conversion available as part of the subXall at www.jvkr.nl/shelves. Place them somewhere in your search path.
This patch then should be doing the it:
Good luck
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johan