HydraIssues

Automate VB-Cable installation in hydranode body provisioning
open unclassified Project: hydranode Reporter: 20 Mar 2026 22:06

Description

## Problem

VB-Cable is a prerequisite for hydravoice but is not installed automatically during body provisioning. On boom-pickle-38, hydravoice was running without VB-Cable installed, meaning ffmpeg was trying to output to a non-existent audio device. Required manual intervention: install VB-Cable via pnputil, set CABLE Output as default recording device, restart hydravoice.

## Proposed Solution

Add VB-Cable setup to the hydranode install flow for Windows bodies with the hydravoice role:

1. **Download and install VB-Cable driver** — `pnputil /add-driver vbMmeCable64_win7.inf /install`
2. **Set CABLE Output as default recording device** — use SoundVolumeView or PowerShell
3. **Configure hydravoice scheduled task with restart-on-failure** — currently runs at startup only with no auto-restart

## Acceptance Criteria

- Fresh body enrollment with hydravoice role gets VB-Cable installed automatically
- CABLE Output set as default recording device
- hydravoice scheduled task restarts on failure
- No manual audio setup needed after enrollment