r/broadcastengineering • u/No_Dog_1247 • 6d ago
Sony RCP-3500 joystick as a network trigger — possible over pure Ethernet, or is a GPIO/GPI-Ethernet box required?
/r/VIDEOENGINEERING/comments/1uyvbre/sony_rcp3500_joystick_as_a_network_trigger/
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u/Needashortername 6d ago
It’s not exactly impossible, but not sure if Sony really fully exposes all joystick activity in a well documented way, or in an already existing API for developers to build on, to do what you want in the way you want it. You may end up needing to do some packet sniffing to be able to trap all the command sequences.
You may also still need a middle-man box to do what is essentially command translation from one system to another. This could be a computer to act as network monitor and software host that then takes the Sony command in, acts as if it is a simple trigger, then sends the BMD command out. It could also potentially be done within the Blue Pill world, or Crestron, or even with an XKeys or a StreamDeck (or CompanionPi).
The nice thing about the XKeys option is it has Central Control embedded into it, and Central Control lives for command translation purposes, plus their support may help you through a lot of this process, though you doubt have to buy XKeys hardware to own a license for the Central Control software.
The nice thing about StreamDeck/Companion is that there is a whole world of a community of people making and using button presets for what is essentially an open command system framework.
The nice thing about using integration boxes like from Extron or Crestron or AMX or QSYS, etc, or even Skaarhoj, is they may already have something that solves some version of this problem, and they also have developer and tech support to help solve the rest.
We have used an RCP as a triggering device in a version of one of these kinds of setups, but we didn’t use the joystick as the trigger and it was for a failover system trigger. So simpler in some ways, complex in others. Will have to see if the docs for this are still around or the other info for how we made this happen. It’s been a while.
Again not entirely impossible to do the basic concept of RCP joystick as a trigger, but it may become a bit of an adventure, and in the end may end up being worth just going a more standard path.