Virtual Reality

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survive another place or suffer great place hardware is in the control system stack and looking at the ability for source software to replace what currently uses a proprietary technologies for controlling user interface the model of that technology being closed proprietary just doesn’t really won’t really get us there really isn’t we’re having something that is anyone can write notes for publish and that you could be really can connect that is you start trying to it will just have these external pressures to do what’s what’s a real change and what’s just sort of a possibility I think this has enough ten chilling this idea of software eating into the control stack %HESITATION I think this has enough potential to disrupt that it’s something that should be taken seriously and looked into and and understood welcome my name is Patrick Murray and today’s guest has been working at Cornell University for over sixteen years and is currently manager of manager of integrated audio and video engineering he has experience designing and delivering for unified communications digital signage video conferencing web conferencing content delivery networks webcasting and video platform services as well as cloud based solutions in some of our previous conversations we’ve talked about some of the alternative solutions he’s been looking into and I’m really looking forward to hearing more about those experiences from Andrew page Andrew welcome to the show Patrick thank you for having me happy to %HESITATION is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to correct or expand upon no you just reminded me though that it is a little old at this point and could use some updating your linkedin profile he mean yes so tell us how did you get started in AV how did you wind up in this little niche industry allow he goes back to public high school and %HESITATION you know messing around with %HESITATION different theater productions and being involved in the tax side of those and friends who had bands you know kind of getting broken to doing the sound and employing these together and seeing what works and what doesn’t work just having that a technical ability to take things apart and putting together and understand how they’re going to work and then that led to when I went to do my undergrad at college I make majored in television and radio production and that kind of solidified that trajectory for me getting into video production and producing things was in the studio and producing stuff in the field and audio production music recording which then after college turned into a couple years doing live sound freelance which is a great gig in the summer but when winter rolls around there’s not a whole lot to do in a central New York unless you want to go on the road and eventually I got a job at a small company called cliff technologies which maybe some of our listeners remember but it was a hard drive manufacturer they need hard drives and CD burners and take back up a music recording industry and also for the film production industry and they would rat him out these devices and the qualifying with various design workstations and non linear editors as I do tech support for them for a couple years and that was a great game so you right out of college you only ring and you pick it up and be like Hey this is serving Hancock and so your goal has done and we had a great customer base we had Sony pictures and and copy it roses was a customer and just a very wide base sting you just never knew who you’re going to be talking to who is going to be calling for support and %HESITATION that that John lesson for a little while until I finally ended up landing this job here at Cornell and I’ve been working my way up through the ranks started out at the language resource center which was a job where I was creating language tapes and digitizing all material managing mac and PC computer lab satellite operations and some other stuff so that really got me a lot of experience with various systems and managing things to be operational there is a consistent level need meaning that the in the system could be down at the right operational and then John opened up for new venue that was being renovated thirteen hundred seat performing arts hall or now and the technical director position opened up and I after that it was a great job so you got to do sound and video conferencing video streaming involved in a lot of great events a lot of concerts visits and that helped me to really see the whole university okay good insight into how the university operates the various in two plays a gone between departments and and very stakeholders so after two years of that moved into a major role and %HESITATION managing the video engineering team at best fourteen and so we support a video conferencing web conferencing service which is based on Cisco infrastructure and soon as a software service package are we offer a video platform service which is billed account for which drives all the online video that comes through Cornell dot EDU and libraries mass and also here and then we have an exact technical support service which we have staff that well or things like town hall meetings and distance learning classes and an operations we have those and commencement convocation and all those special events to go on and the digital signage service and then finally integrated eighty engineering service which does in the consulting is actually and facilities design build process and we do peer review of some of the larger capital projects that comes through and so that’s been my primary focus for about the past six years and and what we’ve been trying to do there is really trying to migrate away from proprietary technologies and move more towards standards based off more traditional IT technologies we can and we’re also looking at taking the hardware stack and migrating into software where it makes sense and then that software itself moving that software as a service for cloud based services so as many of the audio people listening well here we got Andrew here to us to put a headset on so the audio should be just a little better now what you said really a mouthful there so you you took us through your career path and then you started digging into the meat of what this podcast is about that’s the migration to more I. T. based solutions so I just want to comment quickly about that career trajectory ends you know the more I think about it this some background and live sound the music and you know it comes down to production I think it’s a great training field for for many different fields it’s a it’s a great way to learn about technology especially because you’re interested in it right it’s it’s cool to make music and and to put on a show so you’re interested in it you need to learn about this technology you learn about production just because you know the show must go on you learn about showing up on time everything being in the right time in the right place at the right time I think there’s a lot to be said for being in a in a rock band when her teen ager or at least having hanging out with the crowd that those that of course you could see to many different directions but on the more people that I talk to about this the more I realize there are many different ways you could take those skills to more up I don’t know more grown up type of tempers absolutely yeah really I think it it does teach you about the importance of of as you said showing up on time and the show starts at eight OO five you know there’s no there’s no room for wiggle on that and %HESITATION really kind of will hone your ability to work under deadline and to know what deadlines are important and which ones can slip a little bit yeah all very grown up things but I went when you just making music it’s you know that’s the focus and that’s that’s the motivator so I don’t know it’s an interesting thought I think for a for young people for their own motivation so you talked about this move to away from the hardware stack to the I. T. stack of course there’s a reason why we have all this purpose built equipment floating around you can do what we do you can distribute audio video you couldn’t may control systems in touch panels that worked in real time and show control environment you you just couldn’t do it with software even ten years ago I would say certainly not fifteen or twenty years ago or longer but now it is possible so can you talk a little bit more about what that migration looks like how are you evaluating technologies and equipment what kind of things are you looking at just a tell us about what you’ve been up to sure out so the I think the mom one of the places where we first started to see this about over six years ago was in the video playback we’re we’re adding a DVD player or before that a VCR and then of course more recently Blu ray players into every build everything a standard classroom and as we rolled out the video platform service we began to realize that there are opportunities here to right size the technology that was going into each classroom in that we could start to use these cloud based services and is this the whole idea that there was some sort of link there between the cloud services that were being rolled out and what was being built in the classroom or the conference room was kinda new and we start to think well we don’t really need to put these devices and if we can get people to use video streaming to play back their content and there are some hurdles there like around digitizing various pieces of content but we’re able to overcome a lot of those objections and concerns and people were people professors faculty where we’re starting to do it on their own using YouTube so to then kind of shift them to more institutional tools to do that was fairly easy transition and then we’re able to phase out optical media playback devices in our design build and then as we started to get more into a soft was a service for web conferencing we realize the same thing was going to happen with video codecs and we were able to start to instead of incorporating a poly com or Cisco hardware codec into a build we could then put in something like a body %HESITATION Evey bridge and this was several years ago that we started purposely doing this but what we found over time is that it really wasn’t necessarily replacing all of the hardware codecs south records weren’t necessarily placing all the hardware codecs but that we’re just creating more conferencing a campus or just more video conferencing and web conferencing that was occurring with the prevalence of the software and so in some rooms now we just when it had would not have had video conferencing now we have that via some sort of software codec and the rooms where you’re still doing high and distance learning or there’s some specialized need they’ll still have the hardware codecs so it’s interesting that in that regard the softer hasn’t completely displaced a hardware it’s just created more usage of that type technology and we’re we’re now seeing more I’m sorry now where where we’re starting to look at another place where software group place hardware is in the control system stack and looking at the ability for open source software to replace what we currently uses a very proprietary technologies for controlling user interface so I like the way I think this kind of there’s obviously a cultural shift going on because technology is playing more more of a role in everyone’s lives and I think it was interesting to note that your professors worse doing their own streaming with you too right so that they didn’t even need any kind of a purpose built technology to do it the expectation was just there because there’s these pressures from the outside these services are available to pretty much anyone with an internet connection ends I think that that same idea is available in control or at least that same expectation is there from end users with control risers smart TV’s you could control with Alexa everybody has an apple of course it’s not as integrated as we would like it to be as as professionals in this industry but I think the expectation is also there and %HESITATION I’m starting to feel that pressure as well to to keep up with a great looking user interfaces can you tell us more about what you’ve been doing in in the control space and and what technologies in particular you’re looking at the absolutely and that that consumers ation of IT I think is a big pressure and will continue to be a big pressure and and we’ve you know seen it for years in terms of simplicity of design and costs the idea of what I can do this in my living room lies a cost so much why is it so complicated to do this at my work that’s something we’ve always tried to balance is that walk between using commercial and consumer technologies technologies that are familiar to the end users with building things that we can support at an enterprise scale the the technology stack that most interested in right now for control is software called no dread and it’s something that came out of IBM been open sourced in now as part of the I believe it’s a Java foundation and have to look up the exact name of it and this is an open source platform for the internet of things and the way I sort of see it I think the way that it’s described in in their literature is a way to wire together things with web services and and everything in between and it’s a visual basic programming environment so you have these nodes that you drag out onto a canvas and then you wire the nodes up and a node could do a lot of different things so one node could be TCP IP control and another node could be infrared control and then you could have been no debts just doing some sort of logic for you processing the very signals as a comment or you could have a node that is doing HTML and is driving your user interface it’s all based on very familiar technologies for web developers to build around Java script which is like the most popular programming language if you are out there and so a lot of front end developers can be very familiar with this Java script and then the underlying web server technology is no J. S. which is becoming a very popular web server technology so I’m a big fan of no dread anybody who’s been following my blog in and looking at the learning programming dot com website knows that I think node read up first of all I’m really grateful that it came out because using modern programming can be really intimidating for somebody coming from any V. environment even even if you’re an AMX programmer where you’re used to a script type of a language jumping from that to something object oriented something with so many frameworks and different ways of doing things I think it’s intimidating so I’m grateful that no great is out there because I think it’s the easiest way to dip your toe into the waters of of a more modern programming language because like you were saying you just drag over TCP node putting the I. P. address and the connection is there ends to deploy it it’s one click there’s no compiling uploading you can run it on your laptop you could run it pretty much anywhere on a raspberry pi it’s just really flexible and simple to get started so I’m really excited about it and if you do need to get more complicated like you said you’re you’re just writing Java scripts in in these little there’s that function note where you could write as much Java script as you like so it is really flexible and the underlying technology that you mentioned is no J. S. and that is non blocking any event driven which was really always the problem with using like windows XP for control you you would press a button and then it would block the rest of the program until that function was done so no JSA dresses that and I’ve been deploying it on several projects lately and it works just fine so do you have any more thoughts about node reading where you see it going well one of the the I think the really interesting things is the community around it as well and that folks are publishing their flows and they’re publishing their notes so you can go on to the a node red website and you can search and see if someone has created already a floor note for what you’re trying to do and there is already a few in the AV area published so for instance someone has published a node to interface with Kramer presentation switchers cool and there’s there’s a note for PJ link control of projectors and so you can start to where all the stuff together and then it really allows you to move beyond just the AV system in the room because you can tie and external web services you can tie into the field lighting system it’s very easy to tie into that you can find a Luxo or other voice controls we want and voice control it’s really I think the great thing about it is that it is this open platform and allows you to bring in all these various technologies and and make them work in harmony with each other which I always think it’s sort of the goal of us were trying to put together these AB systems is to make it function is one system and the model of that technology being closed and proprietary just doesn’t really won’t really get us there won’t really get us into the future were having something that is open that anyone can write a note for publish and that you could be really can connect with anything that I think is is is absolutely where we have to go in and where the industry will start trying to which it will just have these external pressures to do that yeah I’m kind of I’m looking forward to that future so this this idea of sharing nodes I think is really powerful no J. S. works with node package manager which is basically an online repository that anybody could submit their modules to and when you use no red you basically go into a search bar and look and just look for something you have no idea that it’s and PM underneath there what do you think it’s going to take for the eighty community to develop the habit of publishing their drivers I think it’s some point you’re gonna you’re gonna lose your competitive edge if you’re not publishing your your driver that eventually it’s going to get to a point where in order for you to sell your product you’re going to have to have that that ability for people to interfacing or hardware with an open source control platform that’s interesting so a lot like it happens today manufacture sometimes we even contract a company like mine to write a question on a Max extra module you see the same thing might happen in this open source area I think eventually that’s we’re going to get to yeah fascinating ends in the modern development web development software development it’s actually a common thing to publish open source software just to get some recognition and and show people what kind of skills you have I wonder if that’ll catch on MTV as well possibly so yes we see the next generation of IT slushy V. enthusiasts there too start on their chops I may be a great place for them to demonstrate what they can do so we’re seeing all the praises of these solutions obviously can run anywhere run out or as very pie for thirty five dollars it’s cheap it’s flexible it’s open source what are some of the cons that you could think of I think just the lack of a commercial support structure knowns commercialize this at this point you can’t pick up the phone and called tech support and have someone to walk you through you know the particular issue that you might be having you have to get online and join the forum and you know really said it Diggin yourself to fix things that are happening so that lack of commercials support offering I think is the is the biggest con at this point and and then of course it’s just not proven you know and we don’t want to be putting technologies into our bills that that don’t have a good strong track record and I feel comfortable with the stability of the hardware and software stack and amusing but it’s gonna take some time I think for others to really developed a comfort level yeah a lot of it is perception %HESITATION there’s been plenty of reports I keep mentioning the raspberry pi but I think electronics are also commoditized nowadays I mean a processor Olympics processors Olympics processor course the electronics have some tolerance is built into a but there’s plenty of reports out there of these devices running twenty four seven for many years as far as the software goes really haven’t seen it fall down or do any weird stuff like you mentions you do have to go to Google or go turn to the web to find some answers sometimes when I do that with proprietary systems is what many times so I personally think a lot of this is just perception and I wonder what it will take to actually change that perception because it’s kind of a a you go first type of a scenario at the moment probably just a few brave souls have to step out there and start using it exactly so are you working on anything interesting at the moment that you’d like to share with us something we’ve been working on that that we’ve that we’ve got a lot of head turns a lot of interest is using virtual reality to mock up buildings and rooms and spaces that we’re doing renovation on of that we’re building for the first time and we’re using in that space we’re using rabbit we’re taking the rabbit models and then bringing them into a blender which is an open source tool and texture rising adding textures to the rabbit models and then from there exporting into unreal engine which is working with an oculus rift headset and we’ve been able to get it to the point where we can we take up a building that we’re working on and we can have a person virtually navigate through the entire building go into a into a classroom and I can see the layout of the classrooms you the sight lines look like can get an idea of the screen sizing and it’s been very interesting in terms of the response that we’ve gotten from folks here in our facilities group and I to groups that build these buildings and do the actual designs are architects and engineering folks have X. expressed a lot of interest in it and it’s very compelling you put on the headset and you are really in that space it’s it’s very you know that they were the resolution the fidelity is obviously not the same as reality but the responsiveness as you turn your head as you look around is enough to create the illusion that you’re in that space and you can really get a sense of the space that you just can’t get that sense from a drawing so we’re really excited to start showing this now to our project stakeholders the folks that are making the decisions on budget making the decision you know what schematic design level about you know do we go with one large classroom into smaller classrooms are how we gonna lay out this office space so we see a lot of potential we just started getting this working about a month ago so we haven’t had a lot of experience under belt yet but it shows a lot of promise and I think another place where software can be used within the design build process itself to bring value to the customers absolutely I had a gentleman named David beyond Chardy on the show a few weeks ago and he uses virtual our reality quite a bit for modeling just like you were talking about and his intention there is to manage the risk in in a building projects because you have all these unknowns you’re you’re putting in this technology that may not be tested war parallel technologies that may need to integrate with each other and you’re not quite sure how old how to look in the ends and using virtual well virtual reality is a way for for you to simulate all those different systems working together so I I I kind of took away from that that you’re using it to make design decisions do you see any value as in in terms of managing risk I think one of the things that came out from some of the engineers that came in to see it but the more the %HESITATION the electrical engineering group is being able to look at the various utilities that are going into a space and how they may or may not interact with each other they may you know we may be designing things to try and live in the same exact physical space so some of that risk which I don’t made may not be the same type of risk that that you know John was talking about but no I I we had we’ve really just started to scratch the surface of what we can use this technology for yeah I’m always looking for practical applications but in the beginning of anything like this it’s it’s you really you don’t know what what you don’t know and now there’s just so much potential that you really do need to just start using it to see to see what comes out of it that’s what that’s what our theory was weird okay let’s just start let’s just build it and see what we can do with it and we knew initially I think are our main objective was to try and make decisions about most distant viewer and screen sizing and we creek quickly found that the resolution of the goggles themselves are gonna limit that you’re not gonna be able to really look at you know such and such point font at such a such distance and so that’s legible because the resolution of the display in your eye isn’t it is not dense enough to be able to make those types of decisions but you can get a general sense of the of the size of the screen and there’s all sorts of other design decisions that you can you can make outside of most distant viewer and one of the things we also found just a point of interest is that it can be kind of nauseating to fly through the spaces and some people are okay with it and some people they’re in there for a few minutes and like okay I gotta take a break and so what we’re doing to try and help with that is we’re gonna set up sort of a guided tour mode for folks so that they can put on the headset and it’ll take them through the model in a more no more controlled fashion and then have a pause point we can pause and you can stop and you can look around and you know this is the the such and such classroom and and when you’re ready to proceed to press button then they proceed on to the next point the tour group so providing a more controlled environment for some folks I think will be really helpful and other people are just gonna want bill slicing the whole model and look at every nook and cranny user interface design you’ve got your advanced user that wants to fly yet on the other one who just wants to be taken by the hand and showing around a bit exactly so let’s shift gears back to this control solution with node read what are your ideas on on employing that in in a practical basis how would you deploy it what kind of hardware would you use what kind of user interfaces do you expect how will they be made will be HTML five what do you what does this solution look like in real life so I’m a proof of concept right now that is a raspberry pi and it’s using the raspberry pi foundation touch screen seven inch into seven inch touchscreen mounted into an articulating case on that will sit sits on your desktop and or table top and that screen will articulate up on up and down %HESITATION and the U. I. itself is chromium which is the underlying technology for chrome the odd that the browser chromium is the version that you get on the raspberry pi for for the next and that of the web page itself is running all HTML five and angular which is web technology that allows users to create single paid web apps in the chromium is running a kiosk mode and it’s set to auto boot into kiosk mode so when the same boots up it launches the operating system and washes chromium goes full screen goes to that local host web page which just what page it’s running that the user interface and so that’s four I think you know somewhere sub hundred dollars you’ve got the touch screen and a control processor that is very stable very usable on the the back end of that you could really have any sort of matrix switch your presentation switcher anything that you can find out what the protocol is that its using and if if if it’s published then you’re all set you’re good to go and I found a company that is a manufacturer in China and through Alibaba was able to order a sample unit and for just a few hundred dollars have a very functional presentation switcher with I think it’s got three HDMI and a mini DisplayPort and and a VGA and then each debased T. out an HDMI out into that’s all completely controllable through the note read rats running through the raspberry pi running no grad and then from there you can do up we have said a voice control using Alexa for knocks it out for voice control if you want to add that later on as well wow that’s a that’s pretty fascinating stuff let let me circle back to beat the beginning I’ve been taking some notes here so we describes with the raspberry pi yeah it’s funny we’ve we’ve stumbled upon basically the same technologies so raspberry pi with the the official raspbian image and chromium running in in in kiosk mode and chromium is the open source version of chrome so I I made an image called controlled by its available on get lab which basically does all that for you it’s got raspbian it’s got that chromium that just boots at start up it’s got the SD card in read only mode to protect a little from power outages and then you were talking about using API’s rights you can control anything with an API and that’s what note read does rights you can pull over HTTP notes TCP nodes and I think the cool thing is you can test all that on your laptop without buying any hardware and then deploy the exact same programming to whatever you’ll be using for a control processor and finally this idea of contract manufacturing I I first heard this from Colin purity and it kind of blew my mind but I guess why not go to Ali Baba in order your matrix switcher arm I’m sure that the latest and greatest technology will always need to be provided by purpose built manufacturer with lots of experience in a support team where do you think the line will be or is there one between how do you make that decision between contract manufacturing and in turning to Europe more traditional AB manufactures so I think we’re it’s gonna be is if you’re building two hundred classrooms you’re going to want to try and do it as cost effectively as possible and that’s where you could turn to contract manufacturing you know you could find something off the shelf that that that that manufacture already makes were you could do if you wanted to do something %HESITATION yam give them a spec and have them build that particular product just for you but yeah I think when you get it scale that’s where it starts to really make sense to start turning towards alternative sources for sourcing the actual underlying matrix switching to the signal distribution hardware fascinating but as as these systems scale the risk will be scaling with it how do you go about managing that so there’s and ed at the note read software itself will run on the raspberry pi but also run on a server so you could have a server environment either running locally within your server farm or within Amazon web services or some other infrastructures a service offering and that can provide oversight for all of your installations and you know be hanging each of your devices whether online could send a notification when a device goes off line allow you to actually control various elements of each of the room like so adjusting labels are color schemes are basic functionality all between the those individual pies at fleet of of control pies that you have to use that term back to some sort of central service to monitor and control them and then there’s also enterprise monitoring technologies out there that you could use to be monitoring all your devices so we have here at Cornell we have a a very standard network topology that we deploy where each classroom or conference room we’ll get a fiber from our backbone into the room and then we put in a edge switch same edge switch that goes into our T. our closets maybe smaller ones like a court instead of a twenty four port but sometimes you do you use a twenty four port for larger rooms and each device is on is on that network we have a navy sub netting procedure in place and then all those devices get monitors to enterprise monitoring and that monitoring that is tied into our enterprise notification system so that if a device goes off line whoever is on call will get a push notification on the phone or to get a phone call or whatever they decide is that they want whatever method they decided that they want to have the communication sent to them and so I think as the stars to scale out you just have to start to build enterprise models for monitoring and for notifications and for maintenance of these devices managing a whole fleet as well of of these types of vices got to think about well how do you manage for more updates how do you know when the next version of no J. S. comes out of next version of node package manager comes out you know how you gonna monitor that and I think having a test environment will be important and then also sort of not pushing out updates across the entire ecosystem at once but maybe having a subset of rooms that you push out updates to monitor for stability and then brought to the larger set of rooms so really starts to become more of an active environment like it becomes a production I. T. environment as you start to go down this path and is it really is it before I think the idea of any system as a kind of built it and then it was there for four five six years whatever and then you pry do a forklift on it or maybe you would use you know you’d be able to do some sort of more precise update something more surgical dented a forklift but generally speaking you call people something put in the new stuff I think now start to look at a more of a continuous update model where you’re continuously updating systems you’re adding features adding new a new technologies and and that’s that’s a different model that’s a different way to start thinking about the EVF a structure and start to think about as warm enterprise IT infrastructure absolutely sounds a sounds very interesting and it sounds like you really get the opportunity to to customize like that last point where you’re continually updating not just the end user experience but also that monitoring ands and %HESITATION notification system you can tell that to what best suits your support team absolutely yeah it because certain agree if you’re supporting using slack you can put your you can push notifications to slack at the using UPS genie you know whatever technology they’re using you can build that and it’s not an integration that’s you know it’s not like you’re just stringing things together haphazardly it can be done in a very robust way yeah so I’m what what do we do as a community to start sharing the solutions with each other because the way it is now you go to Infocom and see what manufacturers come out with now we have this alternative where everybody could kind of make their own solution but I think it would be a bad idea to to not share what we learn with each other what how do you see that playing out I think we just need to start developing and %HESITATION publishing are for you know for working with the note read environment or other open source environment start publishing our work there is I think an opportunity to put together some developer kits and a you know bundled together some of the technologies and distribute those for people who want to actually start experimenting with and and using this stuff and then build some sort of community around that so that we can started knowledge share yeah I’m on board for that so one final question on this point I’m I’m not sure how much your organization works with contractors like %HESITATION independent programmers are even integrators consultants where do you see that traditional a V. integration ecosystem what what’s their role in this new kind of an environment where using open source source software and maybe even contracting contract manufacturing the equipment so I think it definitely the installation side was still going to have a need for people to come and install the technology and pull the wires and and we’re all together make a working system out of it but it may be less and less specifying you know spit the particular manufacture that that integrator is comfortable with that maybe less programming and so more along the lines of justice installation component but I think we’re still a little ways off from that reality and there’s a lot of other things that you to play out before before that happens but it would I think would be good for you know anyone who’s in the space to really start learning about what viable technologies are out there and start preparing their people and start thinking about you know what does it look like that what that new future might look like excellent from any final thoughts and things are changing and then technology is always changing and it’s always hard to keep ahead of stuff and no okay what what’s what’s a real change in what’s just sort of a possibility I think this has enough potential like this idea of software eating into the control stack I think this has enough potential to disrupt that it’s it’s something that should be taken seriously and looked into and and understood and certainly maybe not the whole world will move over that way but I think the to be a significant portion of people that just the value proposition is too great to just that’s it took the cost savings and the ability to manage your your infrastructure at an enterprise level we’ll be too attractive in that you’ll you’ll see a lot of folks move over that way but perhaps not everybody great and you thank you so much for being on the show thank you for having me Patrick I hope you can tell from this episode how excited I am that Andrew and I have stumbled upon the same technologies ends Azinger mentions the biggest drawback is there is no one single place to turn to for support to learn exactly how to set these things up how to create a reliable work flow that you could execute on project after project and that’s why we created the control pie image because why should we all be doing the same steps over and over and that’s available completely free and get help just go to get help dot com and search for control pie it’s also why we made the raspberry pi in AV class available at learn AV programming dot com now Andrew inspired me to make a free version of this course so you can dip your toe in the water and get an idea of what it’s like to work with no dread and the raspberry pi in AV systems so go to learn a few programming dot com and sign up for that free course and you’ll get an idea of what we’re talking about ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset rate %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn AV programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share thanks