Integrating Axon C1: Part B

Welcome back! Alright, we're gonna dive into the Q-SYS Designer software, and we're going to start by adding the Axon C1 to our design.

We highly encourage you to use Q-SYS Designer v8.4 or higher,

because it will allow you to use Attero Tech by QSC series products in Q-SYS without requiring the Q-SYS Scripting Engine feature license.

Starting with v8.4, Attero Tech devices have been added to your Inventory Panel. Let’s add that C1 by going to the Inventory Panel and selecting from the Peripherals menu.

You’ll find it in the Attero Tech Control category. Just like any Inventory item,

this component provides you monitoring information on your device not just here in Designer but also in Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager.

You’ll need to be connected to an actual Core to finish this configuration, so let’s Save our Design and Run it to our Core.

Inside the C1 control panel, the first step is to sync this component with the networked device.

You can enter its IP address here, which you saw in the uniFY software.

Then select the Sync button, and you should receive a green light indicating you are paired with the physical device.

By the way, the Identify button here works much like the ID button for other Q-SYS devices:

you can select it, and the light bar on your device will blink, helping you quickly identify which device you’re working on in the real world.

You should notice that the names you created for your Source Select actions, Snapshot actions, and Events are all prepopulated now …

but most of these other controls don’t seem to do much yet. We have a lot of drop-down menus that just don’t have any options. Why is that?

Well, in order to make a component available to the C1 for control,

you have to give it a unique name—something different than its default name it keeps when you first add it to your schematic.

You may recall from your Q-SYS Training that we often used the Named Controls Bin

to make a specific control in Q-SYS available for external devices or programs to control, and this is a very similar idea.

If you select a component and rename it, this creates a unique identifier that avails it to be found by control components like the Axon C1 or scripting engines.

For this example, we’re renaming the Router, a Gain control, a Meter, and of course, a Snapshot Bank.

There’s one more thing we need to do if we want to use our Event actions—you may recall that we said this can be used to change the value of a control pin,

so we need to enable them.

You can add those control pins to your C1 component from its Properties.

I’ll add 2 control pins to this component, and then be sure to expose those control pins so that you can actually wire them to something else in your design.

For this example, I’ll wire them to a System Mute component,

which will mute the entire system rather than just the local zone, and to the bypass button of our EQ component.

Now let’s send this back to the Core so we can see the Axon C1 in action.

Obviously the smart workflow is to do this prep work first, but I wanted to show you what the component looked like if you failed to do so,

so you’d recognize it when you inevitably fail to follow these instructions.

But now that we’ve named our components, this time it’ll be quite easy to pair each menu action to one of our Named Components in the design.

For our Volume control, I can select the Gain component that we renamed, and for the Meter I’ll select the named Meter component.

And as soon as I’ve done that,

I can actually start moving the encoder knob on the device and we’ll see that gain change here in the design, it’s just as easy as that.

If I depress the encoder knob, the channel will mute. It’s already ready to go.

Let’s do the same thing with our Router.

I’ll select our Named Router from the drop down menu here, and then I’ll also select which output of that Router specifically I want to control.

Remember, this is intended to change different sources for a single channel, so if you wanted to get more complicated with your routing options,

you can accomplish that by using Snapshots rather than the Source Select.

But here we can quickly assign each of the source buttons we already named in the uniFY controller with one of the channel inputs of our router.

Once again, this is already operational – if I select the menu button on the C1, I can then scroll to the source I want and press the encoder knob to select,

and that routing option is made in the design.

You can probably guess the same thing will be true with our snapshots.

First I select the name of the Snapshot Bank I want to sync with, as well as the number in that bank that I want to load.

Then, I can activate that snapshot with the C1, which allows me to reconfigure any number of things from gain levels, EQ, routing, audio files, you name it.

I’ve obviously already configured my snapshots within Q-SYS earlier, including the extremely exciting actions that occur during “Party Mode.”

Alright, finally, let’s configure our Events. The Events are located on the second tab of this control panel, named “General.”

Here we can specify what type of action we want to perform, and which control pin will execute for each of our Events.

For instance, we could set a toggle button to turn on or off with these options, or we could simply toggle it from its current state by setting this to “Toggle”.

If you set this to “Pulse”, it will send an on signal followed by an off signal immediately afterwards,

which is similar to a Momentary button or a trigger in Q-SYS, if you’re already familiar with those button types.

I’ve set both of mine to “Toggle”, since their effects are obvious in the room.

As you can see, all of these buttons are in sync with the running design automatically, which means you could place any of these buttons on a UCI in the installation as well

and you wouldn’t have to worry about the C1 showing one state and the design showing another.

In fact, that information flows both ways: if I manually mute this zone here in the design, you’ll see the Mute Light Bar engages on the C1.

The same is true if someone manipulates the gain knob on any of these controls from another place, the C1 will reflect those changes on screen.

We would repeat this process with each C1 for the four Zones, and keep in mind that some of these devices might execute the same snapshots or events as each other.

There’s nothing that precludes that kind of overlap between devices,

which allows you to control as much of your design as you like from any single Axon C1 controller, and they will all stay completely n’sync.

And that's it! Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.