Get Companion running on a Raspberry Pi and create your first show automations!

I use a stream deck to control all sorts of devices in my studio like the A1 Mini my hyper deck recorders OBS and even the lights in my room what makes it all possible is this open source software called companion in this video I'll show you how to set up companion on a Raspberry Pi and how to use it to control an at1 mini and other devices hi I'm Aaron peki you've probably seen me using a stream deck during my live streams and I often do live demos of creating buttons to control things but I've never actually done a full tutorial on how to set this up in the first place if you use an at Mini or any other streaming device you probably realize that either you need to control things that might not have a physical button on the device or you want to control it from farther away so that you don't have to have the ATM right next to you like if you're filming a video podcast you probably want the ATM mini out of the frame especially cuz you'll have all the HDMI cables from your cameras going into it and that just doesn't look great so if the ATM is way over there you need a way to control it here with companion in a stream deck you can run a single USB cable to the stream deck on your table and use it to control the ATM at a distance so before we get started I want to first talk about the difference between running companion on your computer versus on a Raspberry Pi you can run companion on your computer if you want but I actually prefer to run this on a Raspberry Pi for a couple of reasons if you do run on your computer I recommend first quitting the Elgato stream deck app that way companion can take over the whole interface but I prefer running it on a pi so that it's a fully self-contained system that way if my computer crashes it doesn't take down the stream deck buttons too it's also a much more portable system especially if you pair it with a stand like this which lets you mount the pie underneath Neath The Stream deck this is the pro streamer stand for the stream deck XL by INX 3D I'll leave a link down below to where you can find it it lets you put the stream deck on top and mount a pie underneath and it comes in a few different colors white red blue and black so in this next bit of the video we'll get a Raspberry Pi setup in the software installed if you do want to skip this and test out companion on your computer first you can just skip right ahead to the part where we actually get into the companion software using the chapters below so if we running this on a pi you can run it on a pi 4B you definitely don't need to run it on a pi 5 a four will work great you also don't need a lot of ram so I recommend getting a Raspberry Pi 4B with 2 GB of RAM I also highly recommend this fanless heat sink for the pie which also acts as a kind of case for it it means it's silent and it does a good job of keeping it cool I've actually had my pie in this case turned on 24/7 for a few years now and it still works great okay now that you have a pie grab a Micro SD card I'll leave a link down below to the SD cards I use they are the SanDisk 16 GB cards with the A1 rating although it looks like I ran out of those so the one's actually 32 GB but the main thing to look for is that you get an SD card with an A1 or A2 rating now we need to download the companion image for the pi head over to bit focus. i/ companion and log in to find the download link once you're logged in go ahead and click on companion P this is a complete Raspberry Pi image with companion already installed I'll go ahead and download this download the latest stable version and in a couple seconds this should be saved once that's downloaded you're ready to write it to the SD card to do that download the applic Raspberry Pi imager and that's available from raspberry pie.com once you've downloaded that you can go ahead and click on choose operating system scroll down here to custom point that at the companion P image that you downloaded choose storage which you will choose your 32 GB or 16 GB SD card click next and here you'll get a chance to customize the OS settings this is a new thing they added in a recent Raspberry Pi OS update but this is really nice cuz it means you can go ahead and set your username and password and Wi-Fi info here before even booting up the P so I am going to go ahead and set a username and a password and I'm going to configure this to get on the Wi-Fi make sure you do select the right country for your Wi-Fi because that makes it use the right frequencies I'm going to go ahead and choose us it's probably a good idea to set the time zone to your local area as well go ahead and click save and we can click yes and yes again and it's going to go ahead and write this image to the SD card in just a few minutes great and now we're done we can go ahead and remove it from the reader and pop it into the pi the first time you turn on the pi you will probably need a keyboard in the monitor connected so I'll go ahead and show you what it looks like when this boots up so once you plug it in the Raspberry Pi will finish its setup and reboot a couple times and then eventually will show you a login page now if you do have a keyboard and mouse connected you can log into this but it's just a command line interface and you won't need to do this going forward the only reason you might need to do this right now is if you need to find the IP address of the pi now I actually would recommend connecting a ethernet cable to the pi so that you have a wired connection it'll be a much more stable connection to all your devices so before we can continue we need to find the IP address of the P one way to do that is to log in here with the user account you set up when you created the image depending on whether you connected a Wi-Fi or ethernet cable you can find the IP address of your of your Pi by typing if config so here we can see there's nothing plugged into the ethernet it's only got a Wi-Fi address wl0 and the address is 10143 95 5 this is another thing that's going to be different depending on your setup so make sure that you look at the IP address cuz it'll get an address on your own network if you do have the ability to set a static IP address in your router for this I would highly recommend doing it just so that you don't get different addresses every time you start up the P once you found the IP address you don't need the keyboard connected or monitor connected anymore and we're going to do everything else from a computer using the web interface so I'm just going to go ahead and take out the keyboard and now I'm going to plug in the Stream deck on top of this I actually got a short USB cable with a 90° adapter because that's going to make it a little bit cleaner under here so I'm going to plug that end in here do a kind of loop around and get this plugged into the stream deck on the back so back on your computer enter the IP address and Port 8,000 afterwards and that will launch the web interface for companion that's going to go look like this we'll to run you through a little setup guide first we're not going to do any of this advanced stuff yet we can can come back to that later I'm going to skip setting a password here too because everything is just on one network here a closed Network and nobody else has access to it anyway now we're actually ready to talk about companion so if you did install companion on your computer go ahead and click the launch button to get into the interface if you install it on a pi you'll have to type in the IP address into your browser so let's do a quick overview of the interface of companion first over here we have connections this is where we're going to add connections to different devices that we're going to control like the A10 mini here we have buttons which is where we'll create the buttons for the actual stream deck surfaces is going to tell you which stream decks are connected and you can also add more than one or you can even add a remote stream deck from a different Raspberry Pi or different computer which is a nice trick but we'll save that for a different video triggers are a fun feature but it's pretty Advanced this lets you run actions based on feedback from other devices or even scheduled events the settings tab has some basic settings I actually always turn this one on first which just switches the way the page up and but page down buttons work which makes more sense in my head show you how that works in a second Import and Export is of course if you want to import a from a previous companion config or export this to save a backup of it later if things do go wrong you'll find things in the log file but hopefully you won't need that first thing we're going to have to do is actually set up a connection to an ATM mini let's say we have an ATM mini so we'll go ahead and type ATM Blackmagic ATM here this is going to bring you into this little configuration screen where you have to type in the IP address of your ATM it will try to autodiscover them on the network too which is a nice little trick so I'll go ahead and click this one ATM extreme ISO it will try to Auto detect the model if it doesn't work for some reason you can also just tell it exactly which one it is I know this is an A10 mini extreme ISO so we'll just go ahead and check that click save and it should get give you a green check mark here once it's connected now in order to actually make this work with a stream deck of course make sure you go to the surfaces Tab and if it didn't already pop up here click rescan USB and that'll just search for any connected USB devices you should then be seeing the blank companion interface here on page one with up and down arrows this is where you can go to different pages I again I like pressing down to go up in Pages which I guess now that I'm saying it out loud is backwards but this makes more sense in my head you can choose which way you want the page number buttons to go with that setting if you press page one if you press press this page number it'll always jump you back to page one so no matter where you end up you can always skip back to home there now that I have my ATM connected I can go ahead and make some buttons for it so let's go into the buttons page and I'll explain how this works this is your grid of buttons again pressing page up and down will navigate between these different pages you can create up to 99 pages of buttons which is more than enough pressing this button will always jump you back to page one so I like to treat page one as my main interface or even a sort of launcher interface there's two ways to create buttons you can click on an empty slot and create a button and then start adding actions here you can give it a name like button you can change the font and all that but the other way to do it is by by using presets presets will give you preset actions based on whatever devices you've got connected so in my case I only have one ATM MINI Connected so it's showing me one option here if I click on that this will give me but preset buttons for any of these actions for example I might want to use the program buttons and make a bunch of buttons that will immediately switch program to these different camera angles so now I can just drag these in so one quick way to build an interface for an ATM is just to drag in your eight cameras 5 6 78 maybe we add the Super Source as well as a media player and you'll notice that that camera 5 is red this is this is called feedback so over in the button actions what this preset did was basically just create the button with steps and feedback already created so the actual action that's being run here is the ATM setting the program input to from me1 to camera 5 feedback will change this button color text or font based on the state of the ATM so in this case when camera 5 is on air this button is now highlighted in red I don't really like this color very much so I usually end up changing mine to be a little bit more fun but this is a default and it it works fine so now as I'm pressing these buttons we can see we are changing the program input of the ATM and the buttons are changing state to show which one is on air so already you can see how much nicer this is to control the ATM rather than pushing the buttons on the ATM itself but this is also really important because this lets you do things that there aren't buttons for on the ATM in order to demonstrate that I need to go a little bit deeper into the actions on companion so if we go and make a new button down here I'll make an empty button this time and let's say you wanted to change what graphic was on the screen there isn't a button on the physical ATM to change the graphics in your media pool but we can create buttons here for that so let's make one here called title and then under press action I'm going to go ahead and click this little folder and this will give us a a menu of actions that we can search for based on what's connected so here I'm going to search for media and you can see there's a couple different media player options here we're going to say set source and now there is a a press action here which is setting Media Player 1 to this graphic I'm actually going to change this to no this is right my channel art and then we're going to make a new button over here which is called RGB and this will just be the the red green blue background now that I've created a media player set Source action once it shows up under the recently used menu so now this is just faster way to find that same button so here I'll change media player one and this one I'm going to use the RGB background and now it's set so now as I toggle between these two buttons you'll see the background on the image change from the little button presses that I'm doing here this is already faster than digging through the menu on the ATM software control and of course there isn't a button on the ATM itself to do this anyway last thing I want to mention is the side menu over here there's emulator and web buttons which actually let you use the stream deck buttons you've created but from the computer instead so if you launch web buttons you get a web version of the buttons you created this is actually just scrolling down through through the pages so it doesn't work quite the same as pushing the actual buttons but you do get to just click on them here this is actually great if you want to load this up onto an iPad and have it as virtual buttons that you can carry around and if your iPad is Wireless then of course it means you can be walking around the room controlling the ATM from anywhere I mentioned sometimes I use this first page as a launcher page to go to other pages so that's actually something that I do pretty often what I might do is actually create these buttons as my main ATM controller on a different page on let's say page two and then my homepage will be a launcher to go to the different pages I actually often create pages of buttons for specific tasks rather than as a generic controller but I actually have a whole separate video I did on that where I did a deep dive on how my companion interface is set up so I'll leave a link to that video down below but really quick I'll show you how to make this into a launcher page click on an empty button click create button and we can just say page two and then on the press action in the library it'll be an internal action and it's actually going to be if you want to you can scroll to find it or you can just search for page and here we're going to say surface set to page and this is going to jump whatever stream deck is being pushed to whatever page is selected here so we'll choose page two so now if I'm on the launcher page and press page two it's going to jump me here and of course I can always go back to page one by pushing the page button here so you can imagine you can very quickly set up this page as a launcher to go to any pages with for specialized tasks I wouldn't recommend calling it page two I would probably recommend calling it something like record or streaming settings or Graphics things like that that way you can see where you're going to go when you push that button if you've created a whole bunch of buttons on your companion after a while you will probably want to make sure it's backed up again you can go to the export tab here and you just download a file containing all of the configuration that you've done go ahead and click that choose download and that will save a backup file on your computer with everything you've done so that you can always ReStore in case your Raspberry Pi dies or if you want to move it to a new computer this is also a great way to go from a from trying it out on your computer to installing it on a Raspberry Pi later so you can very quickly create that export file from your computer version and then import it into the Raspberry Pi version I hope this video gives you some ideas of how to use a stream deck and companion in your own live streams again I'll link to a video which I did recently which goes into a deep dive of how my companion set up down below and you are welcome to join me on one of my weekly live streams and ask questions if you have any more things you would like to see or if you'd like me to experiment with something for you as always thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Aaron Parecki

Views: 12,378

Keywords:

Id: esh6cewbyO8

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2024