HDMI Hub Using Raspberry Pi

[DJackL]

Hello guys! First post on the forum.
I am totally new to this world, I've been programming for some years now and just getting into hardware electronics and soldering and I've put my eyes on some project of mine I've been thinking about for some time and to realize this project i need a wireless hdmi hub. Let me explain better :

I am building a portable monitor that plugs into every machine that has a type-c output. I have a LOT of machines, precisely a little raspberry pi server, a standard computer, an arch-linux computer and a laptop and in the future i think i'll have even more based on my needs. What i wanted was to use this monitor i'm building, wirelessly, without any cables plugged in. I know it's possible to buy on amazon hdmi transmitters and receivers that can easly achieve this job with one machine but i was wondering if it was possibile to eventually plug all of my machines with hdmi wireless transmitters into a router and connect my monitor to that router and with a raspberry pi inside the monitor to choose when i power it witch monitor i want to see?

I know it seems kinda strange and i don't even know if it's possible or even ever done before but i wanted to ask your serious opinion on the matter. Sorry for the bad English (not my native language) and thanks in advance for any future responses.

 

[TonyArrr]

I imagine it is technically possible, but it definitely won’t be easy. Or even moderate.

Wondering if having the Pi run a VNC client and all your “remote” computers running VNC servers wouldn’t be an easier, cleaner option. If you want some DIY in it you could program yourself a dashboard giving you one-touch access to all the systems.

With wireless HDMI, all you’re transmitting and receiving is a video and audio signal. You would need to figure out a control method to get keyboard and mouse signals to them, and figure out keeping that synced with whichever HDMI signal you’re using at the time.

VNC (and other Remote Desktop protocols) package that all together so you don’t need to reinvent that wheel. They also support authentication, which an HDMI doesn’t, if that is a concern

 

[oneplane]

It's unlikely going to work with USB-C as-is, but what you can do is use those HDMI to Ethernet long-distance devices. They use raw ethernet frames (mostly) but it has been shown to work with anything that can receive MPEG2 streams up to 1080P. If you can get those to stream on different broadcast domains you could pipe those over 802.11 on a dedicated link.

Other than that, this is unlikely to be cheap or work well; every technology that does this will need a realtime encoder and transmitter for this to work. If you also want to send keyboard and mouse input back it gets even more expensive and you're basically looking at a wireless KVM. Those don't strictly exist, you'd be getting a classic networked multi-host KVM and you can then access that in a browser (Which you could turn full-screen). Alternatively a bunch of PiKVM/TinyPilots would work the same way.

I would recommend not doing this, and instead using something like NX, VNC or RDP.

 

[TonyArrr]

PiKVM/TinyPilots

god I forgot all about PiKVM! I wish I had half the intuition of the sort of people who come up with this sort of stuff!

 

[DJackL]

Thanks guys for all your responses, i talked with the pikvm team about this and i might work or might not work but, even if expensive, i've worked out a easy fix for this, just plug all of my machines into an elgato cam link pro (4 hdmi inputs) into a server or maybe even my main machine and then outputting that same machine with only one 60ghz hdmi wireless transmitter (about 200$). That should work flawlessly.

 

[TonyArrr]

So will that allow keyboard/mouse input across them? I’m not familiar with the Elgato…

Or is this just so you can view them, and you don’t need to actually control them?

 

[oneplane]

Thanks guys for all your responses, i talked with the pikvm team about this and i might work or might not work but, even if expensive, i've worked out a easy fix for this, just plug all of my machines into an elgato cam link pro (4 hdmi inputs) into a server or maybe even my main machine and then outputting that same machine with only one 60ghz hdmi wireless transmitter (about 200$). That should work flawlessly.

I wonder why you would do that instead of a remote shell session? Are you using something special like 60fps HD video? Or are you really looking to just see the 'video output'.