Questions on design...

[Brian Chee]

Has anyone tried the gentner control software under vmuser (windows virtual machine) on linux yet?  I'm told that ANY i/o port fully supported by linux is also supported under vmuser....not to mention that if the windoze program hangs the virtual machine, you just close the window and restart the virtual machine.

/brian chee
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Robert Olson 
  To: Jeff W. Boote ; ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 6:52 PM
  Subject: Re: Questions on design...


    1. Can the AG control workstation share control of the Gentner with a
    Crestron or AMX system? Is the "control computer" used for anything other
    then control of the Gentner/audio mixing? If we are using Crestron or AMX
    could we use that in place of the current control software?

  The plan for the control computer is that it'll switch over to being a Linux box when we get Gentner control software that doesn't require Windows (this likely means that we'll be writing some... protocol is very well defined by the Gentner documentation). Then we can do things like gate rat transmission based on Gentner mic gating.

  We also plan to move control of the display machine to this box, doing things like video layout, tool startup, and the like remotely. Ideally we would control the whole node from the one machine so that we can quit the switching back and forth that is currently necessary.

  (I envision an audio control panel that has a row of controls, one per mic, with level meter and gain adjustment. It'd also have a row of controls, one per remote source, again with a level meter and gain adjustment. This application would be the merging of the Gentner controller with remote control/monitoring of the rat running on the audio box. All eminently doable, just requires time to build it).


    2. Is the Gentner a capable overall mixer, or would we still need a Mackie
    mixer for more generic use of the room.

  Depends on what you're doing. All your microphones will have to go directly into the Gentner no matter what, so that echo cancellation and ambient noise detection work properly. The Gentner has a number of other inputs (I think 4 more line level inputs, and 8 outputs on the AP400. The audio box takes one input and output, or two for stereo (that we want to support at some point, and the speakers take one or two outputs.


    In the agspecs-new-colored.ppt document it lists: Mackie, Biamp, Intelix,
    and Voicecrafter.  From my reading of the Gentner literature, it claims to
    do all of this - true?  (We will probably add a Mackie in anyway, so we can
    mix in what ever comes up a little easier, but I was wondering if it was
    necessary.)

  Wow, I forgot about those slides :-). The gentner pretty much rolls the functionality of all those boxes up into one box. 

  As far as adding a Mackie, that'd be fine in the mixed-purpose room. The way I'd use it is to connect its output to a Gentner input, and mix it into the speakers with the Gentner. I'm curious if this is sufficient for your purposes.

  Also wrt general purpose use, Gentner sells an IR remote control for the AP boxes. I'm not sure how it'd play with AG control stuff, however, since I think the IR receiver plugs into the Gentner serial control port.


    3. Is the telephone interface used much for AG? 

  In the current network environment, we use it fairly frequently to patch around lossy network (which causes great badness with the audio).


    The AP800 has some appeal
    over the AP400 because of the additional inputs and outputs, but you loose
    the telephone interface. 

  You can fix this two ways. If you want a *lot* of in/out, you can cable the AP800 to an AP400 and gain four more mics, a bunch of I/O, and the telephone interface. You can also cable in an AP10 which is just the telephone interface.

  By cable in, I mean the gentner private digital bus, which provides a couple internal mixing buses for traffic between boxes. 

  Hope this helps,
  --bob 
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