JTK – Notes and Ramblings Things we have found …

We have used VirtualHere before. This time I thought it might be fun to try it for the iPlayer3 and SmartJackPro. This would involve both ColorPlay3 and QuickPlayPro. The good news is it works. I was able to upload a show to the iPlayer and output DMX from the SmartJackPro. I have not yet tried addressing a fixture via the SmartJackPro.

The remote is a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian Lite Buster(2020-02-14).

The PC is running Windows 10 64-bit.

Server Side

VirtualHere has a download for ARM that runs quite well on the Pi 3 on their Linux server download page. A simple wget https://www.virtualhere.com/sites/default/files/usbserver/vhusbdarm into the folder of your choice followed by chmod +x ./vhusbdarm and sudo vhusbdarm -b and you are set on the server side.

The VirtualHere FAQ describes how to have the server setup to start as a service. The steps for a Pi are pretty straighforward: First you need to copy the server over to /usr/bin: sudo mv vhusbdarm /usr/sbin. Then you will need to create /etc/systemd/system/virtualhere.service with these contents.

[Unit]
Description=VirtualHere USB Sharing
Requires=networking.service
After=networking.service
[Service]
ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c 'logger VirtualHere settling...;sleep 1s;logger VirtualHere settled'
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/vhusbdarm
Type=idle
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then the following commands will setup the service to run at boot.

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable virtualhere
systemctl start virtualhere

NOTE: a license is required to 1) share more than one device with the server or 2) use the CPU optimized versions of the server or 3) sell VirtualHere with your hardware. As of April 2020 the license cost $49. The license key is tied to the hardware of the server.

Details on advanced configuration of the server can be found here.

Client Side

The client is downloaded from the VirtualHere site. There are versions for Linux, OSX and Windows. The download is a single executable file. The first run will install the VirtualHere client drivers and will require admin rights.

The documentation on running the client as a service can be found here. You can not use the client as a service unless the server has a license installed.

The client will offer to install Bonjour, it the server is not already installed, for its auto-discovery feature.

Advanced configuration information and command line parameters are described here.

Installing Open Lighting Architecture on a Raspberry Pi 3.

We start with a clean install if Rasbian Buster Lite. As of April 2020 the raspian repo has the latest version – 0.10.7 so a simple sudo apt-get install ola will suffice. You can confirm the version in the repo with apt show ola. There is additional info on using ola installed from apt here. The info is older but still useful.

If you want to do things the hard way, follow the instructions for a Linux install from git. The Raspbian images for OLA are several years out of date. We will install a bunch of prerequisites first, checkout the project from git, then config and build.

sudo apt-get install libcppunit-dev libcppunit-1.13-0 uuid-dev pkg-config libncurses5-dev libtool autoconf automake g++ libmicrohttpd-dev protobuf-compiler python-protobuf libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev zlib1g-dev bison flex make libftdi-dev libftdi1 libusb-1.0-0-dev liblo-dev libavahi-client-dev python-numpy

sudo apt-get install git
git clone https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola.git ola
cd ola
autoreconf -i

If there are config changes to make of modules to enable. The sample below shows enabling RDM test.

./configure --help
./configure --enable-rdm-tests

Now we are ready to build. This will take a bit of time.

make
make check
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

If everything went well we are ready to start ola.

olad -l 3

You can view the web gui at http://<host>:9090.

bwarden has also got a git repo for the python control of the roku which is a fork of https://github.com/jcarbaugh/python-roku. It seems to support basic control and discovery. The discovery code is SSDP which may prove useful elsewhere.

For openhab integration there is a good forum discussion

I did the automatic update to WordPress 5.4 last night and things got weird. The editor was causing php errors. The browser page appeared blank but turning on developer tools showed there was a pile of stuff including a message to look at https://wordpress.org/support/article/debugging-in-wordpress/

Time to turn on debugging by adding this bit to wp/wp-config.php:

// Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

// Enable display of errors and warnings
define( 'WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true );
@ini_set( 'display_errors', 0 );

// Use dev versions of core JS and CSS files (only needed if you are modifying these core files)
define( 'SCRIPT_DEBUG', true );

This revealed several errors and warnings. The primary one was solved by removing an ancient but in theory up to date plug-in for Movable Type and TypePad import.

The remaining errors were: register_sidebar was called incorrectly. No id was set in the arguments array for the "Sidebar 1" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-1". Manually set the id to "sidebar-1" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. causing several Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/taing/jtkdev.com/wp/wp-includes/functions.php:5167) in /home/taing/jtkdev.com/wp/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6221

In looking at wp-content/themes/classic/functions.php there is very little there. By removing the block below the error messages are gone and the pages seem to display correctly:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
        register_sidebar(array(
                'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
                'after_widget' => '</li>',
                'before_title' => '',
                'after_title' => '',
        ));