Episode 27: BYU OIT AV Services On Raspberry Pi’s, Open Source, Big Data & Security

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survival how can we make all of our EP systems accessible through our university API projects just like every other I and I think one of the principles that we’re trying to adhere to that %HESITATION is making this possible as we we kind of refuse to support any technology does that that does not have a network based control air it actually mounts the raspberry pi and here we have all sinned in about one package which send clips into if you will of three young boxer forgetting box with an Ethernet cable running down into it powers it and provide the network connectivity and that’s kind of the core compute power that’s running in the room itself and so it’s no longer cost prohibitive in one of these active classrooms where we’ve got eight strains ten screens whatever we’ve got in there each screen actually has its own dedicated touch panel security we think is actually a better story with this solution it was before because when you’re dealing with a proprietary eighty solution all you’re limited to whatever they fought for it right welcome my name is Patrick Murray and today’s episode of software defined survival will be a little bit different we are not interviewing one person we are kind of interviewing a project and this is F. projects that took place sores on going at a university to change over from traditional AB control systems to using raspberry pies and the raspberry pi touch screen ends the development process involved in all of that and joining me to discuss that or Daniel wells director of AV engineering Brad Streeter chief engineer and Joe Blodgett primary developer of the open source software at Brigham Young University gentleman welcome to the show thank you thank you so I’ll just address all of you at once and feel free to jump in with whoever thinks they get an answer best and my first question is is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to correct or expand upon you know that kind of sums up the project itself %HESITATION pretty pretty cleanly so where did the original idea come from so as university we’ve been %HESITATION really trying to promote inside of our center well first off the audio visual group is part of the office of ID the central office ID for university and therefore our online management goes through the the CIO and see I only really been trying to promote %HESITATION open standards %HESITATION web based controls API’s restful web services eccentric and all of our IT systems across campus and several years ago I I come from the I. T. side of the house and I was brought down to be a part of the eighty group of one of the challenges that we were given was how can we make all of our EP systems accessible through our university API projects just like every other action system we’re trying to build so that was a challenge that was given to us was was basically around what kind of API skin you provide us from the classroom specifically an AV systems in general so that’s kind of what set us down this road was trying to explore how to do that we we we played an experimental little bit was trying to make our existing better that we’re using %HESITATION put a layer on top of it if you will to make these systems expose expose an external API layer and Matt got pretty it was difficult to get a proprietary ecosystem to play nicely in an open world and that we had we had a bunch of other cycles as well around automation and %HESITATION improved %HESITATION deployments %HESITATION better monitoring %HESITATION we wanted to play around with big data and see what kind of analytics we could get out of our systems and based on that analytics will kind of trend analysis and can get a I helping us out decision so we had a lot of these big broad goals up at the only if we came quickly to the solution that the only way we can make this happen is to start building it from scratch your CIO was on board with letting us do that as for a pie was a favorite piece of hardware for many of us down here that we’ve been playing with for the better part of the decade in many ways and some of us and so it was %HESITATION and we had a test now available that had been recently released some we figured we’d start there and see where it took us excellent I’m I think it’s really interesting to note that the decision kind of came from the top %HESITATION so the stakeholders said we want your systems exposed like everything else we’re used to on on our IT at work was there anything in particular that they were looking for or was it just a global sweep of everything that’s on the network we want to be able to speak with or were there really any particular status is reports or functionality that that they were curious about I think from AB side was largely philosophical from that level %HESITATION okay there is a a problem project that I think got some interest in a globally where we have a a campus mobile app that is trying to incorporate a lot of the functionality of university into it so that’s one that was used early on as a justification for getting this sort of thing is that we can build intentionally the control of the classroom equipment into them all out and API’s obviously can help make that happen a lot more clearly but I think I think also the the intent is to expose anything that’s available yeah so that all of our systems any any metric and control points is is available via the API nothing gives us the option of determining which of those %HESITATION we make usually in a philosophical aspects of our CEO was really we don’t know what our customers want to do is for us to build interfaces for them often times %HESITATION seems things that maybe we shouldn’t be assuming and so giving our customers API’s and letting them determine what they want to do with our systems philosophical goal of his and so he basically mandated in many ways it all over I all of our systems have API’s for that reason alone and then we’ll see where we go from there was kind of his stance in many ways yeah that makes a lot of sense when you start I mean database is a perfect example you can’t do analytics without collecting the data first and you have this chicken or the egg what is it that I should be storing well you don’t really know what will be interesting until you start using these systems until some time goes on so I can certainly appreciate that mindset so once this decision was made you mention that you all had some experience with the raspberry pi what were the first steps that I imagine you made some kind of proof of concept to start with can you describe those initial baby steps if you will yeah let me just talk a little bit more about this but as as we were first starting out while we were working on a lot of the the efforts to put that layer on top of other system we had a couple of students working for us that had some interest in taking this little brother Joe was one of them at the time he was one of the students we kind of just said Hey what you guys are playing with this thing over here and see what you come up with maybe you can talk a little bit Joe about that yeah so it was kind of an interesting problem was handed to us for leadership in the broadest down they just kind of sat down I mean when they decide how hard would it be to do this without our traditional Bender is would be possible you’ll figure it out and then they just left us alone for like five or six months build something at work kind of money for a down until something else before down into something else tore down and finally they realize that they’re paying us just how fun deadline on SA some of them by the state and so we have a push to have our was really simple thing was controlling a couple of Sony TV’s just changing input turning them on things like that from a really basic you why and so we you know we got together I think all the others simply for five months from start times that demo time and once by Sony them this is the only TV is one of those was that the Sony TV have a really nice web API in a restful API on them as we need to really nice and easy for us to talk to them went through several iterations of this and then demo did for the site that they call they is that leadership council here in the us immigration policy they would like to log in kind of a great go ahead with it and maybe make it actually work which was really cool sprinting ever since I’ve been pushing and they make it actually all so what does that process look like went once you seen it working had this touch panel you returning a TV on off on off the proof of concept was there and you mentioned the word sprints which maybe not everybody here is familiar with so maybe you could talk a little bit about that development process how you define goals set metrics and really make sure you stay on track and are always moving forward so I think they’re taking it from where Joe just left the story off %HESITATION we kind of did things a little bit backwards you know and we we got a bit a little bit by the the the high fidelity prototypes problem that a lot of developers running to where we had a thing that looks really it looks pretty good at the time and it it did some very basic things and I I think our our upper line management figured it was more complete than it really was and and gave us a deadline to start putting it out on campus actually with a building that was being built a new edition to a building and and baby gave us the mandate that that building was going to have this product in it what we need to do to get there and so we started scrambling about point to to kind of really hash out what pieces needed to be done in order for this to be you know quote unquote finished right to be a product tied staying in and %HESITATION yeah so we started working with the business seems to kind of gather the needs of the building what were the what was the bare minimum that we needed in this product in order to meet the needs and then just started scrambling at that point we haven’t even completed a mounting solution for the raspberry pi a touch screen so we started scrambling a little bit of a prototyping effort there so brats team he’s got several different skill sets within his engineering group and so we had some of this team working on we actually three models the prototype a %HESITATION a mail for this because we couldn’t find anything nobody had made a decent flush mount wall mount if you will for the raspberry pi touch screen so we modeled one we’ve got some three printers leader printing up we tested a mountain once we decided we liked that day was our work was local aluminum manufacturers and all this was in a compressed time cycle trying to make me this deadline of this building and then all the while Joe was starting to scramble to really make sure this product was solid on the back and was going to work reliably was gonna work in the distributed fashion that we wanted it to and %HESITATION yeah so so one of the things is I guess entry is that the initial battle it was it was really basic beginner talking directly to TV and you know we kind of had a bunch of hard coded commands in a little work and we realized that we had to have something a little more generally could handle not only one kind of TV but could have a potentially any TV there was a guy control any projector any video switcher any any there’s a lot of that was was taking it back in and trying to figure out how to make a generalized back and %HESITATION and that took up some time but in all honesty the actual control got so the system we were done fairly soon in the process on that demo was in October I wanna see the guts of the control system were done probably by January and I don’t think we really need major modifications to them since it’s been a lot of the things that make enterprise system and persistence of the monitoring and ointments and you know the support ability on it and that’s still kind of in that today in the configuration of it and I was really what was the big push from there and and that’s in large part still we’re kind of doing it and I think one of the principles that we’re trying to adhere to that %HESITATION is making this possible as we would have refused to support any technology does not that does not have a network based control air preferably a restful control where a lot of proprietary protocols out there that are dies on the TCP layer which we can work with we we’ve got a lot of those in the system right now but we’re trying to in part of our efforts with this open source initiative a little bit is to raise awareness to vendors out there on the value of making a nice clean restful interface is too users like us out there all right so we covered a you mention a few things that I’d like to circle back on of course open source we’re gonna come back to that the whole software design getting that generalized backends but before we get there can you paint a picture for what the hardware looks like you you mentioned there were some issues or there was no mounting solution available so what are what are the components that are involved in this solution arm so what one thing before you jump into this particular solution is to keep my but the the software suite we’ve written is not fundamentally tied to the rest it runs Danny can run anywhere we actually have an instance of it in a W. last that allows us to remote control July is a very nice you know are devices in the room that is consumer you know consumer mail hold it off the shelf and it looks nice and works well but the system the control system itself is not fundamentally tied %HESITATION their usual system we have that you know the control system goes in a room you have just a pie how we you know we we have a caller just a regular seven inch touch screen and there’s our friend the mounting brackets it’s basically like a little thing that sits behind the pilot also the from the wall by one inch made of anodized aluminum got some you know air flow events in there and it looks really nice it is designed to record a bracket basically on the front side of a two or three or four games electrical box and then then then the actual housing bent the high screen %HESITATION connects into on the back of the pie screen them out it actually mounts the raspberry pi and the people we have all stated about one package which send clips into if you will of three young boxer forgetting box with an Ethernet cable running down into it powers it and provides the the network connectivity and that’s kind of the core compute power that’s running in the room itself excellent just four of those not familiar with the rest very pie hat is basically another circuit board that you could kind of clip right onto there’s GPI opens on the raspberry pi and you kind of put another component right on there and it’s called the hat so so these raspberry pi touch panel solution just has one cat cable going to it for network and power correct right and how many of these do you have to pull it our turn we need a little over two hundred there were about two hundred and thirty eight glasses of last night okay so roughly around two forty home deployed across campus right now they’re they’re kind of a core component of of our efforts of doing what we’re calling an active classroom it’s a concept within education for kind of changing the way professors teach and it it’s a ball and so trying to put technology in an active classroom there’s the concept of all spaces and break out space isn’t so trying to put this technology was really valuable to us because the touch screens on the pies are relatively inexpensive to other touch panel solutions and so it’s no longer cost prohibitive in one of these active classrooms where we’ve got eight strains ten screens whatever we’ve got in there each screen actually has its own dedicated touch panel to enable the technology that we want so that’s part of the reason why the numbers grow we’ve got quite a few those going out there but I say probably only forty of those are some of the active classrooms in the other two hundred are kind of stand alone systems spread across different rooms in cap across campus so that sounds like a really good sample set what kind of issues have you had or their heat issues or anything that you would expect so the main the main issue had with the raspberry pi has been that there’s no on board members storage inside the flash card or an SD cards in there as a result SD cards wear out and OS’s are are not coming by way of how many rights they do so we had an issue where we had the kind of the first wave of the SD card do with kind of a middle grade middle lower rate STR can for cost reasons those all I don’t know if it’s so widespread failures failing at about the same time which makes sense we put them in about so we had to replace those we’re trying to make it out to a few different ways to control how much logging we do making parts of the OS read only and is using yeah so you will be using a larger capacity %HESITATION SD card can help with that read right programeri cycle and then we’ve also gone with what they call high endurance carts that seems to help a little bit as well that are more intended for higher I owe applications I mean the nature of a card and you’re gonna have to replace it every you know three to five years someone in the in the context of of cost you know where the the high in and of itself was was a motivation from a cost perspective and we’re seeing that having to buy the more expensive cars it’s kind of also had a little bit but still is considerably less than any of the other options that we come across yeah we’ve gone from a fifteen dollar card to a twenty dollars or so its first system right so it’s still relatively inexpensive compared what other prosperous those are one problem in the big hardware issue I believe had any hardware problems other than because it’s a it’s kind of made for makers right it’s easy to miss can figure it like you know jumpers in the wrong place to forget to put a lead in the right place Sir attached how wrong and I think those are really the only things you have is just times or you know somebody doesn’t connect the power number to the right in and as a result screen is internal medicine you correct jumper works and and yes you I don’t think it’s also harder levels and if you just you we did with what we we we have another application bad that we’re using the same hardware solution for about was our scheduling panels we actually put in a room schedulers on the outside of conference rooms and whatnot we’ve been experimenting with using the same way as he issues with those it was a different technology we worked a lot of that’s obviously the way you write your code is going to impact he significantly and the way we read the code on the eighty control side from day one we’ve been very conscientious around around you cycle heat down we’ve cleaned out the become significantly on the and also we don’t have somebody and the fact that it’s aluminum melts helps with the dissipation it’s got some some cooling vents on the side we we don’t settled we are stick around the build the low fifties high forties audacity centigrade %HESITATION most of our most of these things out there right now actually designing amount when it was first assigned to had a fan mail to you know to put a little you know little twenty five millimeter fan in there we found that it really wasn’t necessary to do much in addition to he sinks so it out a little noise to the room and the noise wasn’t worth benefits so we actually pull those out because he wasn’t sure and you were able to be aware and make those kind of decisions because your collecting that data correct yes right so the raspberry pi as an access to go see what the process can pressure and has little time to censor and there she can gather that information on an automated basis I was just gonna say along the lines of of metrics and data collection we we have a pretty aggressive policy that just about anything we can measure and track and is being sent out to an L. cluster elastic sac which is a big data open source big data solution but we have kind of is our standard here on campus okay so we covered a bunch of stuff I wanna go back to the original question what kind of challenges it sounded %HESITATION that the biggest challenges will be discovered in deployment so if things aren’t hooked up properly you’ll have some issues with the SD card as the technology has a limited number of rights us so it doesn’t matter where that SD card is deployed it will need to be replaced every few years so you’ll need to plan for that you mentioned how the software can affect the longevity in the performance of the hardware I think that’s something interesting that we could dig into a little bit for example I have my my team here created an image for the raspberry pi that’s completely in read only mode so there are no rights and maybe you could talk a little bit about that scheduling panel and those issues there where was heating up due to the software and and about your open source solution and maybe even the decision to make it all open source hello there break it up unless someone else open source in the next question so I think open source %HESITATION it just fits well with the facade of philosophy of our team in general I think %HESITATION I’ve been a big fan of open source for the better part of my life and %HESITATION as such as we’re building teams and and kind of making %HESITATION bring bringing in resources the organization we we try to bring in people that think the same way we do in some ways since I think just in general the open source option for us just made sense and as long as our upper management was okay with that that’s the way we’re gonna go every time but at the same time Wu was resources being limited that’s part of the reason like open source if we can get this to the point where others are interested or we have people contributing you know the the driver database layer which is a micro service layer where where where we write a micro service for each type of hardware you know AB grade at some point we’ve got a lot of contribution of somebody writing a Panasonic line and somebody writing a Sony line somebody writing at some line of control and and and not having to do that all in house we’re obviously focusing on the hardware that we care about but it opens the doors and and and for everybody to be better weight when you deal with an open source model of the other saying the other reason too is there’s just a lot of great solutions out there already that are in the open source world and they’ve been vetted and tried and and you stand up when you’re working in a live action firemen there are a lot of amazing tools out there for management for deployment for locking things down for security and so it just made sense to have you know access all these tools relative for Reno free I’m out there and so yeah open source just kind of where we gravitate toward every time we can gravitate toward every time we can’t help me either and the other thing to consider is that the meeting be AB manufactures in general are behind in this kind of technology so this is an option for us to kind of evangelize the value of the benefits of this type of control and get you know more people than just me why you influencing the manufacturers to to go out and develop API’s further for the hardware and philosophically for me anytime we can legitimize the value of the business value of open source our software feels like a with me so absolutely I’m on board with with all of that to seize outages in it though you mentioned device drivers so that’s going to be a big problem for everyone and it’s could be a main reason why you might pick a traditional control system because of all the device drivers that are available right can you imagine a way to create some kind of repository with out choosing a platform what would you say the creator of houses for you in your house or your device drivers are well yes I mean and then we see without using platform you mean just like the rest Iverson is absent or what we mean right so so so one solution is going to be based on dot net another one’s going to be on no J. S. another one might be written in gold laying like your solution and that’s it it’s a big enough problem to deal with device drivers themselves but to develop them for all of these different platforms to run I think in our opinion that’s world were standardization comes into play right now the only reason we need device driver layer is because we have such disparate control %HESITATION interfaces out there right now and if we you know things like at Aurora is doing with the reacts platform trying to come up with a standardized way for vendors to expose the functionality their devices out to everyone is the only way that that problem is going to be solved for us in the meantime right you know out we’re trying to do something similar with %HESITATION standardize the interface for the micro services for example that we’re creating know we’re doing a micro service per protocol or per hardware tight and we have a standardized interface on the way the bat micro service exposes the functionality to our system and so if you build out that it’s it’s a standard if you will there’s no reason why somebody else’s control solution can’t piggyback off that same standard and throw those micro services up in their environment and use whatever the slayer logic you use they want if you will and that same code that people have written around %HESITATION each hardware types to control that software there’s are the hardware in their systems the concerned about language and platform as far as programming goes I think the fact we’ve each GPS are communication there between the services abstracts along the way and then documentation or containers Asian really fixes how about the other half of it where you can build a docker container that use your you know your driver might research if you will and it again it exposes over even if it’s not a standard API as long as it’s it’s a configurable piece and it means a few basic requirements usual not docker container on whatever host you’re doing it on our case with high and you say it’s you know running on this issue port and here’s how you talked about drive America’s service in its you know someone extracted and then we we constructed house that generalized layer of the EDTA I it will do all that translation for you and call out of reach so far as it being a language using C. sharp or dot net over go over peace be over now it is kind of hopefully we’ve we’ve made out a non issue the interface is the same regardless of the technology used to ride it as long as we’re doing that as restful API later excellent thanks for that inside I really appreciate that because obviously device drivers are a huge part of this puzzle and yeah I think %HESITATION standardization will play a role in solving that and this idea of micro services is something I’m gonna dig into a bit more as soon as I get off this call but until that how about the question on everyone’s minds security what kind of issues concerns yeah prevention how do you manage and deploy these things to make sure that they’re secure so first up front you’re only as secure as the leaders linking your change and as of right now the weakest link is almost always the devices themselves so that the manufacturing of the the projectors for example may communicate over Iraq TCP socket so even if you know I put a password and SO we transmit over the network over in plain text so until some of those things get fixed the system just isn’t isn’t going to be as secure as it should be as far as a rather enticing souls go the nice news is that it’s just a leading server so we use our cell stack it’s a kind of an animal shelter is open source management system for living servers and so it’s it’s really is very simple to say you know I want the system to be locked down each year chords on the show houses around the bases %HESITATION you trust your lectures music journal a few days here I know your bank records your range or whatever you can basically lock down a rather quiet using the same best practices methodologies exist for regional excellence and that’s one of the reasons the other reasons why we’re excited about this security we think is actually a better story with this solution than I was before because when you’re dealing with a proprietary eighty solution all you’re limited to whatever they fought for it right and in today’s world we’re still finding ourselves largely Intel that space in a lot of our ecosystems which anyone who’s delved into the security side of things now is a town that is very dated when it comes to it’s just it’s security features some mildly so yeah I was Joe was saying we haven’t once again going back to the open source source world right %HESITATION lyrics is used in some of the most secure datacenters in the world and there are a lot of great tools around securing it and the salt stacked we’ve chosen its policy based things so you don’t find what you were security website and every device you bring in gets that policy and figures itself to here to it right which is one of the great things about using an open source product like lyrics as the core OS two system I’m beyond that believe guys self musician gas in this kind of standard everything that we have secured me tied into our it’s a it’s a Seattle based its cast token authorization and we used a somewhat tokens for authorization ongoing session management but that’s your older our choices but because we’re using standards we can use really any of the same things Edie’s care any other web server yeah and Dan were using modern open open standards %HESITATION we grow with as they grow so you know as as they change in support newer encryption algorithms because you know as shots got hacked or you know whatever and they moved to the during Christian algorithm we get it it comes along with the new packages that come down and use our Christian things like SSH are built in by default we’ve got secure shell access to all these devices across the board and there’s just a lot of benefits that you can take advantage of going down to stroke excellent I think the big takeaways there are that nothing is really secure out of the box is more a matter of configuration and %HESITATION yeah and to think security and how you’re going to to manage these things absolutely you mentioned earlier about the elk stack can you dig a little deeper into that what that means with these letters E. L. K. mean and how you’re using it in an AV sense so L. stands for elastic search log stashing combina it’s a it’s a it was was big data engine based on the leucine charting engine %HESITATION basically it’s it’s and it is a big data ingestion searching and then visualization pieces arm so anything that happens on any of our devices every time it turns on every time it turns off every five minutes ago based status check I generates an advance and it pushes out of and up into this elastic search cluster and elastic search is a very powerful green language with which you can you know do all sorts of cross Asian and searching and filtering in one hour we use that for a lot of our modern pieces you actually generate alerts based on presence or lack of presence of certain events we use it for keeping track of the state of the rooms you know this room is on the line is seventy three we also use it for you know validating some of our assumptions so one of the success stories that happened before I got down here actually with with right down you and are managing director was these are getting much out of our existing system and we had previously been putting a bill requiring every wrong the matrix kind of supported that wasn’t being used as much as we had thought it was and as a result we kind of stopped doing that a little bit and so we’ve allows us to do things like that where you can you know we have some assumptions that we make and that he loves either through those or you know district so based decisions they have a direct effect affect on on the bottom line right and it takes all the discussion out of the decision because %HESITATION sometimes it’s just a feeling I think I need a Blu ray player right now you know right any any final thoughts no I mean the only if people are interested in and learning a little bit more about it where we we try to make ourselves available to answer questions and to interesting we’ve got an email address they can reach out to us at AV API DB dash dash API at the way you know you yeah we’re just having a good time over here and we don’t mind talking about it if anybody thinks you’re looking at the code that organization name and get out of this be why you all I see a movie on the space is not that is just one more so you can go find organization get help in the now that you brought that up really quickly what what would that process look like I have a raspberry pi my desk I’m looking at the ghetto repository what what are the steps to make this happen if I’m if I’m a Christian on an X. Ekstrom programmer and I don’t know much about this modern programming stuff do I have a chance so %HESITATION as Daniel said in the beginning we haven’t done a great job of packaging this up so I could read also stops actually isn’t that complicated I mean it is silent but really what it is we have an image we build and maintain that does it kind of infrastructure all marketing things are set up automatically but also has all the pieces on it fundamentally need to run the systems you can download that some get out and then really there’s a there’s an example doctor compose file doctor composes it’s a sin tax on a tool for downloading and running a bunch of different docker containers so you have to his example now herbal solemn duty all your basic stuff you need up and running so I don’t do that you start running the containers and then you have to you know configure whatever device you’re controlling in such a way that it has right passwords and things and there is a slight amount of configuration that data base you have to do ask you might is I don’t know if we have a great documentation about it if somebody is interested in this please do reach out and we’d be happy to you know detail exactly what you have to do and and he is set up so I would imagine that you know if if you’re trying to get a really basic system set up in a contact us we can probably work and working with you through to get set up in less than a day for sure probably a couple hours if your engine is the basic system but I think I think that’s one of our goals as an organization is his timing is to make the code more consumable to the community how we’ve done a lot of of customisation that isn’t really easy for everyone to understand so on going I think we’ll see improvements in terms of how that code is is available on consumables for for those that maybe don’t have the expertise to someone like Joe and going through the process of helping someone set this up in their ecosystem and hearing the questions and problems they run into will only help us make this more simple style of anybody’s interest please please reach out we helped ideas while relations were kind of in the process right now helping them get asked you to set up we’d love to help anybody itself excellent I love the attitude of %HESITATION generosity and helpfulness and yeah I sense a little bit of passion for this new approach to things it is exciting and it can be intimidating I think those first few steps you hear a lot of words a lot of acronyms flying around but %HESITATION getting to that first I touchable and and the light goes on once that happens I think the motivation comes by its own so that’s why I’m always looking for those initial steps how do I make something happen anything else any other personal information like to give out you’ve given some contact info anything else you’d like to mention I think I think from the perspective of an ATV engineer so I didn’t grow up in the in the IT world %HESITATION it’s it’s doable so don’t don’t fear the the the language and the acronyms and and everything in it takes a little bit of time but it’s it’s learn a ball and it’s durable and it’s exciting anything else you’d like to mention %HESITATION lasting for a there there is a group of %HESITATION university have media people that I called CCM see they have a conference every year this year see CMC is being held at %HESITATION sister university up the up the road from us a little bit the state universities in the area university of Utah and we’re less than a hour away from where she’s young she’s gonna be also anybody attending that interested in in in visiting with us and maybe possibly see what we’re doing we’re we’re not too far away so I will I will also be presenting at the conference sure we do we are doing a presentation of the conference excellent thank you so much for being on the show gentleman thank you if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in AV programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an AMX programmer or just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true sure there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from 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 star of 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 guys 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 inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and 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 it with your