The Left-Side Pane

Welcome back!

Let’s finish up our tour of the different areas of the Q-SYS Designer Software by looking at the left-side pane.

This pane has several different panels that expand and collapse in an accordion style,

with only one open at a time.

You’ve already seen the first one—the Inventory, which contains virtual representations of all the physical

hardware devices in your design and their corresponding components.

The most important thing here is the Plus button, which allows you to add new devices from our inventory library.

The second panel, Schematic Pages, you’ve also already seen.

If you’re building a larger design

or you just want to separate different areas of your design onto different pages,

you can add those pages and rename them here.

If you close the Schematic window for any page, this is where you would go to open it up again.

So let’s move on to the User Control Interfaces pane.

This is where you build the interface that a user will interact with to control your system,

which could be deployed onto a native Q-SYS touch screen or a networked PC,

tablet, or smart phone using our Q-SYS Control app.

Like the Schematic Pages, you can use the Plus button to add new UCIs to your design and rename them,

but rather than a blank Schematic page you’ll see this: the UCI Editor window.

We’ll take a deep dive into building UCIs later in this course, but let’s glance at this at a high level.

The first thing you should do is adjust your UCI’s properties to match the type and orientation

of the screen that will eventually display it, which will adjust the footprint of your workspace

to the appropriate pixel dimensions and ratio.

The navigation bar in the UCI Editor lists all of your pages, layers, and objects.

You can use the Plus button at the bottom to create a new page or a new layer on an existing page,

and later you’ll learn some options on different ways to navigate these pages and layers.

You can add controls to your UCI simply by dragging them

either from the schematic itself or using the copy and paste tools.

You can add graphics to the UCI by dragging an image file from any file browser

and you’ll see these all itemized in your navigation bar,

where you can lock them, change their visibility, or adjust their order.

You can get very creative with the design of your UCI, which—again—we’ll explore in later videos.

The next panel is where you’ll find your Snapshots,

which is also a topic that’s covered in a video later in this course.

Snapshots are essentially a recording of the states of one or more controls,

which allow you to recall those controls to their saved states with a single button.

You could have many different Snapshot Banks in your design which all manage different sets of controls.

You also have a Global Snapshot Bank which you should use with extreme caution,

because it can change every single control in the entire design.

Even after you learn how to use Snapshots, be careful when using Global Snapshots.

Next we have Named Controls.

You can drag any control into the Named Controls Bin,

which allows it to be accessed by something that’s not wired to your control in the Schematic.

For instance, you could reference a Named Control from within a Lua script or a Block Controller code.

You could change a Named Control from within the Administrator tool,

which lets you schedule events to occur at a particular time of day.

You could even use a third-party control processor to send commands to your Q-SYS Core over the network,

which could target your Named Controls.

Basically, this bin is the window to allow something outside of your Schematic

to control something inside your Schematic.

You should also note that if you need to export this list of controls,

you can select Tools > Extract Named Controls and get an XML file of these available controls.

It’s also worth noting that a Named Control might have a very ugly name when you drag it in,

so feel free to rename it; as doing so won’t change its link to your original control.

And as always, if you forget where a control came from, you can press Control+F to track it to its original source.

Finally, we have the Inspector, which can check your design for any obvious errors.

No, it can’t tell you whether you’ve done a good job tuning your audio,

but it can locate certain undeniable mistakes.

For instance, if you’re using any scripting components or plugins, it will monitor those for any coding faults,

and you can track those back to the component that is having an issue.

The Inspector also searches for Orphaned Controls,

which is a control that has lost its parent component and now delivers justice at night as a masked vigilante.

A control might become orphaned if you’ve dragged it out of its control panel onto your UCI, for instance,

and then later deleted that original component.

The copy of the control still exists, but it will have a large question mark on it alerting you

that it is no longer is linked to any component, and the Inspector will warn you of its orphaned status.

The Inspector will also notify you of any Unterminated Signals,

which are signals that have not yet been murdered by robots from the future.

Or, in the world of wiring, a terminated wire is something that is connected to a terminal,

and thus an unterminated wire is one that has not been completed.

If you create a signal tag for a wire but you fail to finish that connection somewhere else,

then that tag will have a jagged edge as a warning,

and your Inspector will notify you that the connection is incomplete.

The last thing the Inspector does is keep track of any functions

in your design that require a Core feature license.

If you’ve built a UCI, for instance,

it will remind you that your Core will need a UCI Deployment feature license in order to operate.

The same is true with any scripting elements or plugins that require a Scripting feature license.

If these or any other licenses are required,

you’ll see a yellow lock icon as well as a notification in the top menu bar to remind you to get these licenses

installed on your Core, or else that design will not be able to run on it.

Alright, that’s it for the walkthrough of the various areas of the software itself.

Next we’ll start digging into some specific features and concepts,

and hopefully you should be familiar enough with navigating the software to follow along.

Thanks for watching.