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Audio-over-IP for an Entertainment Venue, Part 2

Deploying an automated audioplayback network at Nickelodeon Universe.

Audio-over-IP for an Entertainment Venue, Part 2

Apr 14, 2010 11:57 AM,
By Bennett Liles

Deploying an automated audioplayback network at Nickelodeon Universe.

Listen to the Podcasts

Part 1

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Part 2

Editor’s note: For your convenience, this transcription of the podcast includes timestamps. If you are listening to the podcast and reading its accompanying transcription, you can use the timestamps to jump to any part of the audio podcast by simply dragging the slider on the podcast to the time indicated in the transcription.

DataNab designed but did not install the Barix audio network system for Nickelodeon Universe. Instead, the theme park used its electrical contractors for the installation. DataNab had to be sure to provide detailed setup and installation instruction since these contractors had limited experience with the system.

 
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Audio-over-IP for an Entertainment Venue, Part 1

DataNab installed a whole new Barix audio entertainment network for Nickelodeon Universe…

SVC: Adam VanOort, in part one, we were talking about the Nickelodeon Universe theme park and the Barix audio network that DataNab set up there. Exactly how do you go about setting up the hardware, the Instreamers, the Exstreamers, their Annuncicom. Is there a software procedure that you go through on those?
VanOort: Yeah, they are all web-based products, and they are all based on the same chipset. So if you figure out how to set up one, you will have no problem setting up the others, but basically, all it takes is a computer that is networked to the device and a web browser. Once you find out the IP address of the device or a sign-in IP address to the device, you can log in with your web browser by just typing that IP in the address bar, and then once you have done that, a prebuilt configuration page will show up just like any other web page and allow you to make all the configuration settings and definitions that you need. The IP address can sometimes be a little bit difficult to know under certain circumstances, so what Barix has done is put a nice little feature in there that they call “Sonic IP,” and this would be used if you plug a device into a network that has a DHCP server on it, which is going to automatically assign an address. If you’re the network administrator, of course, you can find out what address has been assigned to the device and so on, but if you’re just a random tech from outside the building or a user inside the building that doesn’t have that access and you plug the device in, there wouldn’t really be a good way to find out the IP address without the Sonic IP feature. What this feature does is when you plug it in, if you plug your headphones into the device, it will actually audibly tell you in a voice with a German accent what the IP address is. So it will tell you “192.168” or whatever it is and then you can just write that down and get into it using that method. [timestamp: 2:39]

I understand that they use some satellite music feeds. How do they connect to the satellite music feeds?
In the instance, where you’re sending a feed up, basically once [the Instreamers are] on the network, it doesn’t matter what path they are taking, whether it’s over DSL or cable modem or T1 or a satellite feed. If it has the network attached to it, it can be programmed to send the feed to any IP address in any port on the Internet. So whether it’s an internal IP address or one over the Internet that gets routed through a satellite, it’s kind of transparent to the Instreamer. It’s just another network to it so you just tell it where to send the feed and it can send it. In addition, the Instreamer can also be a server, so if you have got devices out in the field that want to go poll audio feed from the Instreamer, they just need to know how to access the Instreamer over the network. Again, it doesn’t matter what kind of network it is as long as it’s a IP network and it’s routed properly, you can get to the Instreamer whether it’s through satellite or standard cable, DSL, T1, whatever. You just need to know where that IP address is, and then it will go poll the feed from the Instreamer and in that case the Instreamer acts as a server. [timestamp: 3:48]

How is this stuff protected?
Yeah, their park is inside, and they actually have at least a virtual dedicated network for all of these audio devices in the park, so they are all set within the same subnet. They all can talk directly to each other without going over any external networks or the Internet or anything like that, but at the same time, for the background music and ads and things like that, the Exstreamer 100s can actually be used as well. In that case, they can poll, whether it’s satellite radio or just Internet radio or whatever, they can poll those feeds down from the Internet and then play them out through an Instreamer to the rest of the Exstreamers in the park for the background music or advertisements if they wanted to post those from a remote location. [timestamp: 4:40]

How do they provide power to these things? Did you have to provide power, or did they already have that in place?
They all come with just your standard little wall wart power supply, and they are all mounted or installed within communication closets that are located around the park. And obviously each of those closets, in addition to the network, you have power available there for other switches and routers and other devices as well so that wasn’t a big issue. They just used them out of the box and plugged them right in. [timestamp: 5:07]

They’ve got the same power back up feature as the network stuff?
Yeah, the devices themselves don’t come with a UPS or anything built-in; however, we’ve had a number of customers use off-the-shelf UPSs to power these things, and they will actually go for a long time because they’re very low-power devices—anything from probably 4W to 8W maximum. We’ve even had customers in remote locations, like out in the desert or where there is only satellite access, use solar power to them because they are such low-power devices and that is one of the nice features about them. [timestamp: 5:41]

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Audio-over-IP for an Entertainment Venue, Part 2

Apr 14, 2010 11:57 AM,
By Bennett Liles

Deploying an automated audioplayback network at Nickelodeon Universe.

I was kind of wondering about the security on this. Is there any kind of special security that the Barix stuff has to have or is it just the regular security for the entire network?
Yeah, obviously they are going to be in charge of security in their network. Even if someone were to hack into the network—which, in that case, I am sure they would have bigger issues than whether or not you would be able to hear a audio feed of a Nickelodeon commercial or something—but there is security built into the devices. [There are] multiple levels of password protection for different access levels, so if you first try to log in with a web browser and it’s locked out, you need to supply a password in order to gain access to anything. That’s pretty much just for the cases where someone might have one of these things on the Internet, that’s exposed to the Internet, and they don’t want someone to be able to just happen to jump on this IP address and guess what port you’re using and then get in and start changing things just because they’re bored. It’s definitely secured. [timestamp: 6.40]

Mainly just for the people that are going to be programming the thing primarily, I guess?
Yeah, and you can also have read-only levels, where people couldn’t see what is going only [but] not necessarily change any configurations or things like that. But yeah, that’s all built into the device. It’s just like any other web-enabled device or account. You have to log into your email and provide a user name and password just like you have to log into this thing and provide a user name and password. [timestamp: 7:02]

Now, tell me a little bit about the IO12 devices.
Yeah, we mentioned a little bit in part one that the IO12 device is an RS-45 enabled device and RS-45 is just serial streaming network. So instead of Ethernet or RS-232, we are talking RS-45 so it uses a single pair to communicate over a serial network. And the IO12 has 12 inputs and 12 outputs on it, and in this application, we actually just used the inputs and one of the outputs. The inputs, again, … were tied into the pushbuttons that the operators for the rides used and that allowed the operators to go ahead and trigger different audio clips to be played from the Annuncicom. So the whole schematic of the system would look like an Annuncicom at the top, have a USB stick plugged into it with a MP3 file stored on it, or multiple MP3 files that Annuncicom talked over RS-45 to the IO12, and it polls the IO12 and finds the status of the inputs with what is called ‘Modbus RTU protocol’—and that’s just a standard automation protocol that’s commonly used for I/O devices—and then the IO12 itself is the thing checking the inputs and making that data available to the network over RS-45. So it’s not real exciting to talk about, but it’s a very solid little device that allows you to attach various inputs and outputs to it and then get the status of one or more of those devices over a network. [timestamp: 8:34]

Right, now, I know on the human interface part of it, Barix talks about their BCL programming environment. What’s that all about?
Yeah, BCL, I think, originally stood for “Barix Control Language”. It’s basically the programming environment or the language that allows you to do all this customization and automation routines in the units themselves. It’s very similar to Fortran or something like that. It’s just a text-based language, very similar to Basic. It’s got a bunch of if-then loops in there. In most programs, you will see a lot of if-then loops [and] for-next loops. It’s got all the logical conditions that you can program into it, but then the most important part and the most powerful part about the language as well as the device is the fact that all of the interfaces—the Ethernet interface, RS-232, RS-45, the I/O, whatever—they are all wide open so there is not a prebuilt set of function box that limits you to using it in just specific ways. You can actually completely control all of the information and data that is streaming in and out of the device through any of the interfaces. So you could set it up to send emails. As I mentioned before, you could set an Annuncicom up, for instance, to record a stream from a microphone or a RCA stream coming in to it; you could record that to a MP3 file on the USB stick and then program it to go ahead and upload it to a web server or a FTP site all through this BCL programming. So it’s a very very powerful programming environment that gives you access to basically all of the features that the hardware has to offer without any of the limitations. [timestamp: 10:14]

Even if it’s a little bit new to you, once you have gone through and done several of these devices, you probably get to become an old hand at it pretty quick.

Yeah, the people that get into it really get into it. And those are typically people that have some programming experience, whether it’s PLCs or software programming, C++ or Visual Basic, or things like that. If you’ve got any amount of programming experience, it’s not going to be tough to figure this stuff out. If you’ve never done anything like that, then obviously it’s a pretty big jump. But like I said, the people that jump into it and are able to understand basics about programming just love it because it gives them so much control and power over what they are trying to do. [timestamp: 10:53]

How long did it take you to get this whole network set up and operating from the time you got in there to the time you were able to check everything out and make sure it worked?
The biggest part of the project was actually the specification process where the engineering team for the Nickelodeon theme park at the mall called us up. I ended up being the main contact actually for this project. But they’d talked to me on a number of occasions; we went and had a couple of meetings, and basically got everything lined up. I helped with the design process, helped them decide which components they should use and how it should all be tied together. … That was over a period of a couple months; obviously not full time, but a day here, a day there, a couple of hours here, [that] I would spend with them working on those things. Once we had everything specified and all the details worked out, then it was a matter of putting together the programs that allowed all of our components to communicate for the customized sequences. For instance, the Annuncicom and the IO12 talking together and polling files off of the USB stick on-demand and those types of things. It probably took a couple of weeks to do all of the programming. I would say 40 to 60 hours of total programming work. And then once that was done, pretty much we provided them with the hardware and preprogrammed the units for them. So they got the electrical contractors there. We gave them a big box of stuff that was labeled with some instructions, and they started putting it all in and then, as I briefly mentioned before, we did have to go back and create a couple of very detailed instruction sheets for different portions of the project that they didn’t have much experience with. But, overall, the process went fairly smoothly and the amount of work that it actually took to do it wasn’t that much once everything was specified and all of the details got worked out. [timestamp: 12:44]

Does it look like you’re going to be doing any of this again or have you got anything else like this sort of in the works?
We’ve done a large number of projects, not exactly like this, but we are in contact with customers and new clients every day that find the Barix stuff or find our stuff online and say, “Hey, this looks really interesting. Could you use it to this?” or, “Could you use it do this?” and invariably the answer when it comes to the Barix hardware is, “Yeah, we probably can just because it’s so open,” and the programming environment allows you to basically do whatever you want with the hardware. So we get a lot of requests for custom solutions and programming jobs that deal with these types of devices, and we have a lot of success with them as well. [timestamp: 13:30]

All right, it’s Adam VanOort with DataNab and the installation is at the Mall of America, Nickelodeon Universe, huge theme park networked with Barix IP audio stuff and Adam it’s been great having you here on the Networked AV podcast and it sounds like it was a challenging installation.
Yeah, I absolutely appreciate your time and having us on.

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