What means ‘solution first’ in large scale Crestron installations

Hi, I’m Niko from A-Knowledge. Solution first, what do we mean by this? This is a concept that typically comes to play into larger scale Crestron installation. So imagine a typical commercial install where you have your customer that over the years and maybe in different geographic locations has installed a multitude of rooms. Now, typically what would happen is the customer would install a room, and that room would be programmed and thus providing the customer’s solution.

Throughout a period of time over so many rooms we would have that solution to be repeated into multiple installations. Now, sure, some aspects of the solution are to be repeated in software, but more than often we would see that the different rooms would actually get different programs inside. Now, because of Crestron’s push towards C# and particular SIMPL#Pro, it’s very easy these days to actually come up with a common code base and literally go about and send the same program into every room. So by using the functionality of reading out of config files, by using SIMPL#Pro to dynamically configure the hardware in your program, you can actually come to that one solution that goes into every room. Now why is this such an important aspect? Because in the more standard scenario, imagine your customer wants to change let’s how volume is to be controlled in the rooms.

Now the program can for sure make that change somewhere once, but then we’ll have to go and apply that into multiple programs and upload and test into multiple rooms. With a truly common code base scenario where there’s one code structure that literally gets deployed into every room, you can sit down with your customer, talk about that solution, make your changes, and test it with your customer, put the solution first, and then use that solution and deploy it into all of these rooms, which would definitely speed up time and be a much more cost efficient way for your customer to manage his installations.