Debuting Commands – Do More with Overlay.live Devices

One word: commands.

Until now, the job of any device connected to Overlay.live was to stream telemetric data. It’s simple: stream the data and use it to generate real-time telemetric overlays for broadcast and live streaming. But what if we could go the other way around?

What if with the press of a button you could affect systems or certain behaviors on a device. Well, this is now possible. Here are commands!

The use-case for commands

At Overlay.live we rarely do anything without a clear use-case to define the projet requirements. What spiked our curiosity at first was a small niche need within the community that wanted to remotely operate hardware physically connected to their Overlay.live device.

We did a bit of digging and came up with a simple yet very effective solution that leveraged the same technology used by devices to stream telemetric data. But this time, “sort of” in reverse.

This means that you can:

1. Define sets of commands for a device and define actions to do on call
2. Remotely load these commands to the Overlay.live Dashboard (it integrates just like sensors, but in their own category)
3. Call remotely these commands and trigger an action.

This is what the command listing is like in your typical Overlay.live online dashboard:

And you can of course access these from buttons with our recently launched Android mobile app.

Use commands for

Ever needed to reset something? Re-calibrate a sensor or turn OFF then ON a component hooked to your telemetry system?

With a bit of imagination, you’ll quickly see what this can be useful for!

For developers and node.js users

If you are a developer that is already familiar with our node.js library to connect devices with Overlay.live – this functionality is now also available to you.

Head over to our Github repository and check-out the documentation as well as some sample codes to get started. Adding support for commands is super simple – but if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

We are looking forward to see some cool projets!

illustration: Simon Migaj