> " a lamp on the camera which says whether or not the cam's on " I have a pic programmed to do this, when faced with different characters at a serial port.As we've discussed on IRC, I myself don't see this as the right solution. The use of a PIC is needlessly complicated, it introduces cabling requirements (although the cabling requirements to make RS-232 frames transmit correctly admittedly aren't stringent), there could be serial port problems, you can only run one camera per serial port, many machines nowadays dont even have serial ports..I suggest using a single I/O line off the parallel port, as it can be programmed to act as an 8-bit general-purpose TTL-level output.
My newest laptop does not have a parallell port either, for what it is worth. To be future proof, the only way to go is USB. Can any of the cheap USB lamps
be switched on/off by software?
We should be able to organise the talkback with asterisk next yearso it should be fine.Are you sure the added complexity of Asterisk is worth the out-of-the-boxed-ness? It seems to be a very large system, with transcoders and CPU-intensive things... Considering we'll have gigabit between the machines, we could just write some near-zero-latency program which will push 48KHz 16-bit PCM directly from the ADC of the dvswitch box to the camop boxen...
Suggestion: The dvsource-firewire could have an audio return stream. TCP sockets are two-way, after all... -- Herman Robak