The ability to control various functions from your Elgato Stream Deck is growing more popular for streamers by the day, and thankfully more and more services are being integrated. But what if you wanted to add logic in between these services, or connect to platforms that aren’t yet supported natively on your Stream Deck? Well with Stream Hydra, we can show you how all of this is possible with only a few clicks, and it’s free! In this guide, we’ll explore how to setup a connection to Stream Hydra in order to control and trigger applets from pressing a button on your Stream Deck.
But Why? What can I do? #
In Stream Hydra, you can link together nodes and pass data between them in order to automate various tasks that as a streamer, you would otherwise do manually. For example, you can setup an applet to add, remove and handle Twitch Channel Point Rewards to allow your viewers to redeem these rewards and automatically perform whatever action you wanted. A popular use for this is to allow your audience to spend channel points on your stream to spawn mobs on your player in a Minecraft server. If you would like to know more about setting this up, check out this guide. You could do the same if you wanted to grant people a role in your discord server if they donate, or if somebody subscribes to your Patreon page they get a specific shout-out on your Twitch stream. The possibilities are truly endless with all of the different functions that Stream Hydra support on the services we have added, with more coming soon! You can control your Discord server, your Philips Hue Smart Lights, your Minecraft Server, your Twitch channel, your Patreon page, or send tweets automatically, all from within Stream Hydra. So, let’s see how we can control all of this from pressing buttons on your Stream Deck.
Creating The Applet #
Firstly, if you haven’t already, head over to Stream Hydra to login or create an account – It’s FREE!.
Next, from the modules page, enable the “Elgato Stream Deck” Module. While you’re here, feel free to connect any other services that you wish to be able to control from Stream Hydra. You can always come back to this page to add/remove services in the future.
Now, let’s add some functionality. If you want to save time, you could also choose from premade applets on the “templates” page but for now we’ll cover how to create applets from scratch to include a connection to your Stream Deck. So first, open the “Applets” tab and hit “New Applet”.
You should now be looking at the applet editor. Here you can drag nodes onto the panel and connect them together to perform various functions on specific triggers. Before we get started, click the pen icon at the top next to “New Applet” to set a name for this applet, bear in mind you don’t have to, and the names don’t have to be unique across your other applets. To trigger nodes from your Stream Deck, we first need to scroll down the nodes list until we see the “Stream Deck” section with a node inside called “On Button Press”. Drag this node into the editor and the node options should pop up.
Here, you have the option to specify a unique identifier for this node, which is useful if you want to have multiple buttons link to this applet. For this guide, we’ll link this node to Twitch to send a message in chat whenever a button is pressed on the Stream Deck. This might not have any real-world use but whatever you choose to do with your applets is completely up to you! I’m going to type in “Twitch-Chat” as my identifier and hit save. Now I’m going to drag in the “Twitch – Send Chat” node and connect them together by dragging the red dot to the green dot
Double clicking on the “Send Chat” node will open up the options. Here you can type whatever message you want the bot to say in your Twitch Channel’s chat. Now that we have a basic applet ready, we’ll go ahead and hit “Save”, “Close” and “Enable”. The applet is now ready to listen for Stream Deck button inputs. But wait! We haven’t finished setting up the connection to Stream Deck, let’s take a look at this now.
Connecting to Your Stream Deck #
Now that the applet is setup and enabled, head over to the Stream Deck Keys page on the left tab bar. Here we’ll configure your secret key to put into the plugin in order to connect to Stream Hydra.
Before we click “Download the Stream Deck Plugin” to install the plugin onto your Stream Deck, let’s quickly create a key that we will use in that plugin. Click “Generate New Key” and a popup will appear with a dropdown for you to select the applet that we just made, select that applet and click “Generate”.
You should now see a key has been created for you. Don’t lose it! If you do you’ll have to regenerate the key and any existing connections to this applet will break until you update the key in your Stream Deck plugin. Copy the key and keep it safe.
After clicking done, you should see your applet listed on the page with an “active” tag. You can delete this key or regenerate it using the buttons on the right in the future but for now we’ll leave this and move on to setting up your Stream Deck buttons!
Once you’ve installed the Stream Hydra plugin into your Stream Deck program, you should see 2 available functions, “Execute Applet” and “Enable/Disable Applet”. Simply drag the functions onto keys you want to use and open the config. We’ll use the “Execute Applet” function for now.
We can now input the required information for our applet to work. For “Title” you can type whatever you want, this is only displayed to you over the icon. Paste your generated API key into the “Key” field and if you specified an identifier (which we did earlier), copy that into the “Identifier” field. We should now have a working connection!
Try it out! If the API key is correct, your identifier matches and your applet is enabled, you should see Stream Hydra sending chat messages in your Twitch channel when you press the button, awesome! You can set up many applets to all be linked to different buttons on your Stream Deck, check out all the nodes that are available in the applet editor to get an idea of the true levels of customisation available.
What Else Can I Do With My Stream Deck? #
Aside from triggering the “On Button Press” node in your applets, you can also enable and disable applets using your Stream Deck too! This is especially useful if you have applets that setup your streaming environment for different games/modes and you want to change the environment by pressing a button. Simply drag in the “Enable/Disable” function onto a Stream Deck button, paste in your API key from the applet and voila! Now when you press the button, it will toggle your applet on and off.
We can’t wait to see what applets you create using the Stream Deck Module. Chat with us on our discord to let us know if you have any questions or if you require help, we’re always on hand to assist!
