Receiving SDI commands with Arduino Shield?

Hello, first post.

I am controlling a Black Magic Micro Studio camera 4k with the Black Magic Arduino shield attached to an Arduino UNO, changing settings like the sensor gain, aperture, lift etc. using a small LCD screen and some push buttons. I would like to be able to tell the camera to send all of its current settings back to the arduino so that the internal values can be updated within the arduino at startup or when connecting to a camera for the first time to avoid large jumps in the settings when things are adjusted for the first time.

I am reading on the forums that support for receiving commands through SDI is not supported by the Arduino shield but the posts are old and things might have changed since then. I just want to know for sure that this is not possible before I start trying to implement other solutions. It is telling that there is no example sketch for receiving data from SDI through the shield, again I just want to double check before crossing the possibility off the list.

Thank you,

Eli

The Micro camera only has two SDI connections, one output for the video signal (no data imbedded) and one input to receive the switcher return video, which has the camera control commands imbeddd. This input does not send data back out as far as I know or have seen. That said, Kim is making a nice control over SDI unit, that is currently computer controlled (small windows or Apple OSX) and is adding tablet control later. See viewtopic.php?f=4&t=73283.

If you just want control of the camera settings, and not color correction settings, you can also use an SBus controller like Phil’s Onle Little Remote, and ver 4 has a lcd screen added, to control the camera menu settings controlled by the CCU, and the camera will keep the SBus settings (except focus/iris) when rebooted.
Cheers

The camera is always slave to the sdi control. It cant / wont send data back of its status.

So it is only one way traffic. Atem or shield to camera

Thanks for the info everyone.

...and the camera will keep the SBus settings (except focus/iris) when rebooted.

In this case is it a menu option within the camera to remember the most recent values or is it in fact the controller which remembers the most recent values and then sends them all out when the camera is rebooted? This is probably the direction that I will be going. I do in fact want control over color correction.

It is the camera remembering the menu selections, set by the SBus controller. Color shading is done by the CCU commands only, and is lost once the camera is powered off, but when rebooted with an ATEM, the previous settings should be restored, but I am not sure about this. Perhaps Daniel could add to this, as he is very familiar with the ATEMs and how they work with BM cameras.
Cheers

Interesting SDI shield!
What if I place the arduino SDI shield in-between an ATEM and a BMMSC.
Can I receive the ATEM commands going out to the SDI shield and monitor possible tally's, GPIO's and so on.
Also will the SDI shield filter the commands or are they all relayed from the in- to the output.
Cheers,
John

You have to write your complete own interpretation for receiving.. There is no standard function or lib for that.

Also the protocol does not have GPIO.. It has tally by camera numbers and control data(shading) for all cameras..

The shield is developed with the purpose in mind to give the user the option to control BMD cameras from different controllers then BMD switchers..

So you can use tally from a Panasonic mixer to control tally on the BMD cameras..

Dashing responce!
What about the loop-thru?
If a ATEM puts all control data on the assigned SDI out (like AUX),
what happens with this ATEMs command data, does it still go thru the SDI shield to the camera(s)?
Or is the data filtered and the modified parameters replaced by the shield, in other words, does everything else go thru or is everything (from the shields SDI input being ignored and) replaced by whatever the shield puts on.
Cheers,
John

[Gary Adams]

Hello John. Basically you can set the Shield to either pass all ATEM CCU data or replace all ATEM CCU data with new data. Like Daniel said, there is no library for reading CCU data from the ATEM. So it is either or. The Tally is a bit different in that you can read tally from the ATEM and modify or pass that along to the camera. There is a read function for Tally in the library. So it is possible to pass along all CCU data while modify or adding to Tally. Hope this helps.

Regards, Gary

Thanks Gary, that helps.
So, CCU data is all thru or replaced by the shield.
And Tally data is a separate block and can be adjusted independent form CCU data.
I think I'm gonna get me one of those shields and have a play with it, probably easier.

btw, is it posible to use it with a raspberry pi if I only hook up I2C (and ground obviously).

cheers,
John

Pi is 3.3V right? You need a 5V logic to run it.. And the shield doesn't like level shifters very much..

Correct, but there are specific I2C level shifters that can work at least 400kHz like TI's PCA9306 or PCA9406 for 1MHz bus speeds.
Or just the old fashion way with two FET's and four pull-ups;

Less speed but maybe fast enough.
But software wise?
Is there already something out there or nothing yet?

Try it.. But i had no luck with this setup and with a level shift ic.. For some reason the FPGA seems to be very picky.. Had my Saleae logic analyzer on the lines and it registered the data to be OK. But the shield did not communicate.. While on a 5V arduino there is no problem...

Codewise there are 2 companies that made a readout setup... And both are not sharing there code..

Our company does also extracting the data from the SDI lines.. But we use our own processing instead of the shield. Not nearly as much heat as the shield produces..

Also the shield seems to miss out on some packets sometimes from what i expierenced.. Doesn't have to be bad.. But all depends on what you are doing with the data..

Our company does also extracting the data from the SDI lines.. But we use our own processing instead of the shield. Not nearly as much heat as the shield produces..

What kind of hardware are you using for this?