Title pretty much says it all. I was just looking at the new 1.5 updates and thinking about feeding the output of Convolutional Chaos into Generic Geometric Utility or one of the Spectral Mesh variants once I get my setup together again finally (should be just a couple more weeks), and it hit me that being able to route video between two or more Raspberry Pis over a network instead of having to patch the output of one into the capture device on the other would be really useful.
Just something as simple as making the output from any Pis on the network available to any other Pi as an input, and mapping one of the Nanokontrol buttons to cycle through all of the network sources and a local capture device.
That’s all.
…wow! - yes, very good idea…
…as an example: at the moment i have four dedicated Pis in my mobile setup which also includes a small closed network (only Pis and iPads of the mobile setup are part of it and only via cable via a small network-switch, also part of the setup) - being able to remove all those input<->output accessories to route the video between those pis would be great!..
i’ve done a bunch of testing with using OSC to have one pi as a master controller for a bunch of other ones, works pretty well but kinda stalled out on designing the gui phase because i kinda suck at gui stuff and it was taking me way too much time to learn even the smallest things.
i’m somewhat skeptical that there would be the ability to do decent quality frame sharing between pis at a reasonable rate on the VSERPI without digging deeper into the NDI sdk and jury rigging something custom up. main problem with the pi 3b is that the ethernet controller is locked into usb 2.0 speeds.
but the main other thing to consider is that currently VSERPI dev in general is mostly stalled out just due to the fact that i gots to spend my time making money to pay rents and selling the pi synths is not really how i’m doing that these days. if the patreon takes off and a lot of more folks all ask for this kinda stuff then i’d be able to learn the necessary skills to drastically change stuff up. but even then we’d still have to consider pi shortages and the fact that i probably won’t do any super heavy development for hardware sets that are mostly imaginary. kind of a bummer i know, but its just how things are.
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Maybe something that could work down the road if stuff gets ported to Pi 4 or a different platform. I figured at 640x480 network bandwidth probably wouldn’t be a huge issue if there were only two or three machines with hard connections to a router, at least, but I don’t really know of course.
yeah definitely a good consideration for future projects for sure. something that has been floating in my mind for a long time is usage of ethernet based networking as a launchpad for a more explicitly digital oriented form of modular synthesis. I’m the kind of person who basically just aesthetically alienated by the tangles of cables involved in a eurorack setup, while i find that the modular concept is kind of the best for synthesis in general. having all control and media signals multiplexed via gigabit ethernet and allocated via menu based mod matrices seems like something i could really get behind tho.
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I don’t mind tangles of cables in general, but 1/8" cables and (often) tiny, cramped control layouts are a deal breaker for me. The only reason I have anythig Eurorack around at all is for a few video modules.
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