Sending UDP Packets

[muntedpissmole 1]

Hi guys,

Just got CinemaVision up and running in my home cinema and wow, what a product. Just a question regarding sending a UDP packet called by an action. I have a Clipsal C-Bus touchscreen that is capable of triggering lighting scenes based on the data received in a UDP packet on a user-defined port.

Using packet sender I can successfully send the appropriate ascii command and the relevant lighting scene will activate. So what I am hoping you guys can tell me is how to setup sending ascii text to a port at an IP address as a script, that way I can call it using an action in my sequence. For example I want to trigger a "trailer lights" scene when the trailers start to roll and then an "all off" scene when the feature begins.

Cheers guys!

[Ragnarok 197]

On 9/17/2016 at 5:34 PM, muntedpissmole said:

Hi guys,

Just got CinemaVision up and running in my home cinema and wow, what a product. Just a question regarding sending a UDP packet called by an action. I have a Clipsal C-Bus touchscreen that is capable of triggering lighting scenes based on the data received in a UDP packet on a user-defined port.

Using packet sender I can successfully send the appropriate ascii command and the relevant lighting scene will activate. So what I am hoping you guys can tell me is how to setup sending ascii text to a port at an IP address as a script, that way I can call it using an action in my sequence. For example I want to trigger a "trailer lights" scene when the trailers start to roll and then an "all off" scene when the feature begins.

Cheers guys!

Hey, thanks! What you'll have to do is create a python script and then call that with an Action. I found this on the internet that hopefully points you in the right direction:

Quote

With Python, you need to convert your string to raw bytes. You would have to encode the string as bytes. Over the network you need to send bytes and not characters. 

Try creating a Python script, and putting this in it, where the IP, port and message are what you want to send:

print("UDP target IP:", UDP_IP)
print("UDP target port:", UDP_PORT)
print("message:", MESSAGE)

sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM) # UDP
sock.sendto(bytes(MESSAGE, "utf-8"), (UDP_IP, UDP_PORT))

Then create an action file that looks like this:

python://<Path_to_script>\<Script_name>.py

You can also pass arguments from Actions to the Python script if you want to do that instead. You'll have to set the Python script up to accept those arguments. Here's an example of what that Action looks like:

python://<Path_to_script>\<Script_name>.py
argument1
argument2
argument3

In theory, you could use that to create one Python script that you call and pass the IP, port, and message to, which then sends it to the appropriate device.