DeusO GmbH Archives - OCA Alliance

DeusO GmbH has released a software named AES70 Explorer to support hardware engineers developing or integrating AES70 into Pro Audio devices.

AES70 Explorer is designed to connect, expose and control parameters in OCA objects. The software provides a UI builder for fast setup of engineering interfaces and can simultaneously test multiple devices using an array of Pro Audio control widgets.

AES70 is an open control and monitoring standard for professional audio and video network devices, promoted by the OCA Alliance industry consortium. From a single device and controller, to networks with almost any number of devices and multiple controllers, AES70 provides for powerful, high speed, low cost, robust system control and monitoring of devices from different manufacturers. The standard was recently updated with a raft of enhancements and new features that improve accessibility and usability.

When implementing or integrating a control protocol, having an engineering user interface is a crucial step in the development process. As a leading implementer and developer of AES70 solutions, DeusO recognized this and decided the best contribution to support AES70 adoption was to create a free software tool which provides completely customizable engineering interfaces for hardware engineers, testers and product owners.

DeusO AES70 Explorer image1

AES70 Explorer discovers devices using mDNS, as well as via manual connections to a device’s IP address. Once connected, the left navigation lists devices, and presents a tree of device objects. Each device object represents an OCA class type, and a control widget is automatically assigned to each object based on this class type.

Adding a widget to the engineering user interfaces is as simple as clicking on the icon next to the specific object. It is possible to view the individual object parameters in the control panel as well as control these directly with the assigned control widget.

DeusO AES70 Explorer image2 The UI Builder offers widget layout formatting for organizing the engineering interface, as well as local storage for saving multiple interfaces which can be recalled as needed. The storage feature is designed to help manage very complex device UIs, by simplifying layouts, and organizing specific testing or monitoring interfaces into collections of control widgets.
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“AES70 Explorer makes the hardware integration process for AES70 demonstrably faster. Internally we use AES70 Explorer to develop and test our own AES70 device integrations, easily finding and fixing issues right away. We think other teams can benefit from this tool for speeding up development, not only for hardware engineers but also for the front-end designers and control interface software engineers,” says Arne Gödeke, co-founder of DeusO.

AES70 Explorer is built on pre-existing software libraries which are available under open source licenses. The free download is available for both Windows 10 or higher and macOS Catalina or higher.

Since 2015, DeusO GmbH specialized as developers of Control Widgets, Web-based User Interfaces and AES70 Control Protocol libraries for professional audio devices and cross-platform applications. For additional information on how AES70 Explorer might benefit adoption of AES70, contact Matt Hardy.

The software is available here: https://aes70explorer.com/download/
www.deuso.de

Implementation made easy

In a landmark demonstration, OCA Alliance member, DeusO GmbH, has created a control implementation that requires minimal processing and can be implemented in as little as a 1kB solution. This is a highly significant development as it puts AES70 control solutions within the reach of any who wish to implement it.

AES70 is a device control standard that offers a flexible, cost-effective approach to system control. It offers interoperable, standards-based control, free from any particular control system or user interface and works alongside any audio and video networking control protocol.

Scale systems up or down

“One of the fundamental design goals of AES70 and OCA (Open Control Architecture) is to allow scalability, both upwards and downwards. The initial implementations and systems using the standard were larger and more complex, so some perceive the standard as only being able to scale upwards, and thus better suiting applications where more heavyweight hardware with multitudes of processing resources are in place,” says Ethan Wetzell, Marketing Committee Chair for the OCA Alliance. “However, it delights me to to say that our friends at DeusO have put an end to that with a real-world demonstration of an implementation within a static device – in this instance, the Arduino UNO microcontroller board, as it is the smallest development device available with built-in Ethernet capacity – requiring just 1 kB of RAM on the microcontroller system.”

With this (very) slow microcontroller, limited RAM and 100Mbit ethernet, DeusO demonstrated the performance of their lightweight AES70 implementation via a ‘round trip’ web browser user interface connected with the AES70.js (a full controller implementation). The network packets for all control data make a round trip to inform the UI of parameter changes. The UI elements had both read and write widgets for each object in the device. Additionally, a read-only meter provided a general responsiveness example. There were no perceivable latency or performance problems with controlling the smallest AES70 device ever created.

“This new implementation of AES70 proves that any hardware can adopt and benefit from AES70 as its control solution with minimal impact on the rest of the device,” says Matt Hardy, Business Development Partner at DeusO GmbH. “The lightweight nature of AES70 allows manufacturers to use their own proprietary control protocol and implement AES70 over the top of it to allow for a transition to a fully AES70 control solution at any time.”

The future is now

Certain manufacturers adopt this approach – Focusrite being a case in point – whose products run a combination of AES70 and their own control solution. The advantage for manufacturers is that they don’t have to wait for next-generation products in order to implement AES70. Therefore, they can start their transition with their current offering and benefit from the flexibility and interoperability offered by an industry-wide protocol without losing the unique benefits of their own solution.

DeusO GmbH

DeusO GmbH has released a software named AES70 Explorer to support hardware engineers developing or integrating AES70 into Pro Audio devices.

Implementation made easy

Scale systems up or down

The future is now

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