Long term interactive installation advices

Hello vvvvorum,

Im going to make a small bike simulator installation for an exhibition that will be open for 3 months, and i wanted to see if i could get general advice and practices from more experienced users in the area of long term installations:

for example:

  • using custom Startup to initiate vvvv and its root, i know ive read that somewhere on the forum,
  • Remote desktop to debug stuff from afar once the installation is up and running.
  • Maybe avoiding certain patch habits?
  • particular nodes that seem to be unreliable?

I hope some one can spare some tips,
Cheers!

I always use DeepFreeze to lock my PC.

I really have good experience with it. If I need data to record or something I split my HDD and freeze the state of the drive where the patch is running and write the data to the partition which is not freezed. So everytime you switch on the PC it will be in the same state.

For remote I always use Teamviewer with a fixed ID it never let me down.

Regular reboots using Windows Scheduler, ideally every morning (or whenever the it’s expected to be quiet before use).

Have a backup PC placed near the installation that can quickly be switched over by a someone without programming skills.

In terms of patching - simulate your patches, leave it for a day, a week, etc. Simulate data controlling the installation to see if it falls over. vvvv is very stable once you stop patching!

watchdog
I made this to launch and watch process to see if they hang, its messy as I was trying to keep everything in 1 patch with no subs, I have improved this somewhat now, but as noone likes it…
It will reboot at a set time, relaunch a hung vvvv instance, and relaunch it if its quit
Deep freeze looks pretty interesting, not come across that before!
VLC nodes are crashy for me, but apart from that, you just have to leave your pc on running for a few days if a logfile so you can see if it dies why it died!

thanks everyone for their input,
do you guys reckon is a bad idea To use S and R nodes when using CreateNode to bring up patches?

Lock all your patches! (ctrl+e)
Backup them.

make separate account with low access rights and use autologon (nice free software) in your admin account to boot into this account