I know everything in the world it’s transitioning some sort of IP/Networked signal, but as I’ve mentioned before with 2022/2110/NDI/SRT you’ll always end up choosing the wrong one, this is the reason why I consider the legacy way more interesting, and there is nothing more legacy than the SDI born in the late ‘80 it’s still surviving and actively developed. None I can say about the video routers and their ecosystems still based on some sort of not so fancy control protocol over some sort of serial interface.

To cut short a crosspoint commands it’s made by 3 elements: a destination, a source and a level; the first two are pretty self-explanatory, the level it’s the media type, in the big an complex systems, for example, you can split audio, video and data into different matrixes or different modules and control everything from a single command.

Here we come to the reason for this project, some time ago I’ve acquired some video router to build my studio at home I’ve ended up acquiring a lot of 5 8x8 HD/3G routers and 1 8x8 SD (this one literally catch fire, but this is a story for another time, I’ve managed to save the 5 3G) I quickly realise the problem was not to find the matrix itself but to find the control panels, so why not to do a little reverse engineer and build write something.

My weapon of choice for this project is the Leitch / Harris / Imagine Communications branded Panacea video router, this kind of devices are in my opinion very consistent XY protocol (in different flavours) the same code that I’ve written for a device released in early 2000 (Panacea/XPlus) can still run on every modern Imagine platforms like the Integrator or Platinum.

Imagine Communications devices are managed via XY Protocols, even if the name is similar between them they behave in a very different way.

• XY Terminal (the crosspoint commands are specified in multiple lines via RS232 variables are decimal numbers)
• XY Telnet (same as the XY Terminal but via Telnet)
• XY Serial (the crosspoint command is a single string and every serial or telnet connection are joined to a shared stream where you can read every session and send commands, variables are hex)
• XY Client (the router open a session to a client but I’ve never figured out how the handshake works)

You can find an example of XY Terminal and XY Serial code at https://github.com/lrizzi/xy-panel the python web services act as an API gateway, the web pages are a simple frontend.

First made a serial cable, attention Vax use a DEC423 serial port designed for long distant terminal line:

--------------- 1 - DTR (Data terminal ready)
I             I 2 - TxD (Transmit data)
I    1  2  3  4  5  6   I 3 - GND (Signal ground)
I                                         I 4 - RxC (Receive common)
I                                         I 5 - RxD (Receive data)
---------I____I 6 - DSR (Data set ready)

Pin 2 of the phone connector goes to Rx pin of the serial (3 of DB25 or 2 of DB9), pins 3 & 4 go to ground (7 of DB25 or 5 of DB9), and pin 5 goes to Tx pin (2 of DB25 or 3 of DB9).

Then, make sure that the S3 switch (on the front of the 4000/60) is set to the up position so that the VAX uses the serial console instead of the graphics console.

Then, load up your favourite terminal application, set the speed to 9600 baud, make sure hardware handshaking is off, and see if you can talk to the VAX.