Elgato Stream Deck!?

[seltzdesign]

I picked up one of the Elgato Stream Decks, which is basically a small touchscreen with some physical buttons over it. Pretty nice at what it does. They are on sale for just over 100 Euros here in Switzerland at the moment, which still isn’t cheap, but okay for something that works so well out of the box.

The software to edit the buttons is suprisingly useful and universal, you can set custom images, text and you can assign shortcuts, even does toggle buttons with 2 shortcuts, folders, profiles for different software, etc. So pretty nifty little tool even outside of streaming.

The only thing it lacks of course is any sort of way to display information on it (other than for the software that is pre-programmed, like showing twitch viewers and stuff like that).

I found this github repo (https://github.com/Lange/node-elgato-stream-deck) that provides a Node JS interface for the stream deck.

Can someone estimate how difficult it would be to make it work in vvvv? Basically be able to set a color, image and text. Would someone be up for it?

Thanks.

[antokhio]

it’s really hard to tell how hard it would be without hardware sadly…
since it’s a node js, i suspect there is a server running somewhere…

you prolly can POST on it with some http

[seltzdesign]

Yes, I guess its running on a server, since it is normally used to display streaming-related (so web-related) content. That of course wouldn’t be necessary in this case, since even if web-based stuff would be necessary, vvvv can already get that anyways.

Yeah true, would be kind of hard without the hardware. The node server part is pretty simple though, you can just install a local node server.

[phlegma]

I also had a quick look. I think this is the file which does all communication with the Elgato device:
https://github.com/Lange/node-elgato-stream-deck/blob/master/index.js
The nodeJs script is communicating via HID. So there is just some byte buffer magic which seems not so complicated to port it to c# / vvvv / vl with the given script.

[seltzdesign]

@phlegma - thanks, I think you are right. Alas, I am not proficient enough in c# to do something like that, but maybe someone will do it one day.

Till then I have looked into just using the keyboard shortcuts and since a lot of keyboard shortcuts are used by either vvvv or the system, I have started to make a short list of whats available and what isn’t including the key codes. So if anyone ever wonders what you can and can’t use, this might help:

vvvv - available keyboard shortcuts

Its editable, so feel free to add comments, etc. The available keys are for the keyboard set to english, which is the only way to set a keyboard imho ;)

I’ll also attach my quick and dirty shortcut checker patch.

keyboard_shortcuts.v4p (18.9 KB)

Hopefully it will help someone as it helped me.

ps: I didn’t even bother checking the shortcut combinations with Ctrl or Ctrl + Alt since too many of them are already taken by vvvv and system fuctions.

[rockbert]

It took me about a day to get it running natively with vvvv as a C# Plugin, but I just took existing code and added a wrapper. I will check whether I can open source that.

In the mean time you can take a look at this: https://github.com/bitfocus/companion