Chris Roberts MEng. MIET
I was at one time, a BT customer. They had the best deal for FTTC broadband in my area, so it made sense to go with them. One of the things they offered at the time was a Yahoo account – which for some inexplicable reason you were forced to link to any previous account with the same email address.
I created one – with my usual online moniker of naxxfish. What a mistake that turned out to be….
One of the unique challenges of CSR FM is it’s structure, where it is part funded by two separate universities each with a presence in Canterbury (University of Kent and Christ Church University) and their respective student unions (Kent Union and CCCU). Student members could be enrolled at either institution, and as such each institution has it’s own radio studio on campus – each of which has an equal chance of being put on air. The station also invites members of the community to participate.
This has presented a challenge, in that live audio needs to make it’s way from either studio to the transmitter, hosted at the University of Kent in Eliot College. From the outset of the CSR project, the route between the two has always been over IP – there was no other reasonable option. Up until recently, that was realised using a IP Codec – with it’s packets being routed over the institution’s networks.
This is perfectly fine, and for the most part worked very well. However, recently CSR has had a fundamental infrastructure change to it’s audio distribution (as part of the Student Media Center project), which has made every single audio source and destination available using Axia’s Livewire Audio over IP protocol over their internal network. This allows fantastic flexibility and allowing studios to route any source to their mixing consoles, as well as increased interoperability with our automation systems and customisable GPIO control.
However, the second studio (Studio Blue) was still connected via an IP codec link, which was not integrated into the system at all and offered limited capacity for routing over the link (only a stereo pair to and from the router). Unfortunately the link between the two sites, over the academic networks that link the universities, would not be suitable to transport Livewire (for a number of very good reasons, lack of multicast and custom QoS being one). It was therefore necessary that we provided a Layer 2 link between the two locations to carry this traffic, which we had complete control over.
Once again, I got roped into helping out CSRfm and this time KTV in getting their OBs from Keynstock 2014 on air.
There were some not insignficant challenges. Our normal network access at Keynes was effectively cut off due to some changes to configuration. This was quite troublesome, as we had always previously relied on this access to get our signals back to our HQ. The outlook seemed bleak. What we ended up doing instead, though, actually seemed to work out rather better.
I’ve been helping with the installation of a brand new Axia Livewire network at CSR FM. The network is a bit different to the usual installation – and that deserves it’s own post. We’ve been using PathfinderPC to do all of the routing control.
It’s all pretty clever stuff – but we wanted to be able to extract information from Pathfinder so that we could do handy things like find out which studio is on air, and use that information to show the right webcam on the website, or use it to add further information to our Now Playing data. Pathfinder has a way of doing this – using Protocol Translators. Basically, it’s a TCP listener (or client, or Serial Port) which accepts and sends commands to a remote device. The protocol is very well documented in the manual, and is very flexible in what it lets you do.
But, it’s a bit of a pain to connect to from, lets say, PHP – which isn’t really well suited to doing socket operations. Also, you’d want to cache the results somehow, lest poor Pathfinder get inundated by people looking at the webcam!
No.
So I decided to make a little thingy that sits in between Pathfinder and the potentially unruly web apps on the other end.
Thus, PFInterfaceWeb. It exposes various data sources over HTTP – like a list of all source, destinations and current routes. Also – and particularly usefully – memory slots! This lets us query our Stack Event logic and work out who’s on air, what mics are live…. etc etc.
Oh, also, it optionally can send messages to a STOMP compatible Message Queue server whenever a memory slot, or route, changes, or custom Protocol Translator commands are sent.
At some point, I’ll make it monitor GPIO, and also Silence Detect events.
Hopefully, this will prove handy!
My partner, Beth, asked me if I could make her a Theremin. So I have. It’s called the Betheremin.
A Theremin is a musical instrument, which changes pitch and/or volume as you bring your hand close to it’s antenna(e). The way this works is by your hand influencing the capacitance of a resonator circuit, changing the frequency at which it oscillates. This difference in frequency creates a “beat” frequency against a reference oscillator, which can then be used to create an audible frequency or control a Voltage Controlled Amplifier.
Good day, fine visitor-person.
This is a brand new blog, and much like a new notebook I will write some information about me on this first post.
My name is Chris Roberts, I am a Broadcast Engineer by trade – but have had an interest in Technology since forever. I’ve done a degree in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Kent, and I, as of this writing, work for a “large international broadcaster” in London.
I have a history of being overly attached to whiteboards, cakes and lab coats.
