Art-Net Q-SYS plugin

UPDATE:
 - This post continues to get quite a lot of traffic. The plugin still exists, I know the download link is broken, I've left the freelance market since I wrote this so keeping side projects up to date has had to take a back seat for a while. I hope that I can pick it up again in the future!


I've written a plugin for QSC Q-SYS that enables it to output Art-Net. You can download it here.

Q-SYS is an amazingly powerful integration tool that I believe can be used for much more than the boardroom A/V or commercial audio processing (airports, shopping centres etc) that it's known for.

With a little programming knowledge it is pretty simple to write plugins for Q-SYS, and it's easy to get TCP or UDP communications up and running. The real power of Q-SYS lies in its tried and tested architecture - it is amazing at redundancy but yet so simple to use and setup.

So with a little imagination it's easy to make things like custom control interfaces. A small microcontroller with a network stack (I use Texas C series, but even arduino would do fine) and a custom plugin for Q-SYS and you're away. Using the same method it's easy to make adapters - perhaps a Q-SYS to DMX512-A adapter, or Q-SYS to CAN-BUS? How about a Q-SYS hosted object based surround processor (I've made one; perhaps I'll share it on here...).

The wonder of technology that's so open is that it's just a toolkit, it's up to you how you use it.