UCI Customization

Now that you know the basic steps of creating and managing a UCI, it’s time to add your own content.

You can add controls, indicators, graphic objects, as well as your own custom images from other applications.

You can simply copy and paste one or multiple objects from the Schematic Page in your UCI.

So let’s go back to our Schematic Page and grab all of these controls.

Now it’s important to note that you can’t drag a component itself into its UCI

but you can add its control elements enabling full control of any component.

So let's copy that (Control+C) and then go back to our UCI and (Control+V) to paste these. It's also important to note,

there are a few controls which aren’t functional in a UCI, such as the response graphs in the RTA,

Equalizers and Dynamics, and all of these are listed in the Help file.

All of your Graphic Tools work in the UCI so you can create Text Boxes, Headers, Group Boxes, and Polygons.

If you’re unfamiliar with these tools, check out Software Overview at qsctraining.com.

Now that’s all well and good but here comes the exciting part.

You can add outside images to your UCI to make it look even better.

To do this all you need to do is drag your completed item into your UCI control.

Let’s go ahead and resize this. In fact if you load a graphic that has a transparency like this one,

you can build some pretty interesting button shells. You’ll notice that this has a transparency through the middle.

This hole is punched out, so if we draw our own button with this polygon tool

let's kind of draw around the outside of it, there we go. That’s good enough.

and then we assign this control to this button.

All you have to do is drag this over it and then hold the control key to assign the control to that region.

And then all you need to do is send this button to the back. So that it is behind this button.

You can do that by going to Tools, Order, Send to Back,

and now that button is positioned all the way in the back.

Let’s go ahead and run this to the Core so I can show you what that looks like. Pretty cool, right?

Let’s take it one step further. Let’s say I don’t really like this black background

and we want to add our own custom background to that.

You can do that by again dragging in a custom graphic that you already have created.

Let's drag our own custom background into our UCI, so let's again

click on that element and send it to the back and Boom!

You have a pretty cool UCI. To keep things looking organized,

you can click on the top or left margin to create orange guidelines.

But these lines are for reference purpose only and won’t be visible in your final design,

but they can really help to keep your design organized and aligned if you use them properly.

They kind of snap to those buttons. Alright. And if you don’t like them, you can always remove them

by hovering over them and then just dragging them up and out of your design.

Once your UCI is complete, it’s time to deploy. If you’re using a TSC-3 or TSC-8,

then you’ll want to add it to your Inventory, by going to Inventory,

hitting this Plus icon, Peripherals, and select that.

And then the last step is to tell that component which UCI it wants to use, we'll select my UCI

and then your device is ready to go.

For an iPhone or iPad, you’ll first have to install the free Q-SYS Control App from the Apple Store.

Then connect to the wireless network that your Q-SYS system is on,

and then the available UCIs will appear on the screen.

Select the one you want and Bam! Instant wireless control in your system.

To access the UCI on a networked PC,

install the Q-SYS UCI Viewer that you downloaded from the QSC website and run that program.

You should see an available list of UCIs that you can access. And there it is.

And remember you can test your UCI in Emulation mode if you don’t have access to the Core.

Now in the last section of this tutorial I’m going to show you a few advanced methods

that you can use to create even more dynamic UCIs, but until then,

take a quick break and we’ll see you when you get back.