Video Transcript
Introduction to Q-SYS Control (Part 1)
6m 23s
00:07
Welcome to "Intro to Control”, as part of our QSC Quantum Training,
00:11
an advanced service and troubleshooting curriculum.
00:14
My name is Patrick Heyn and today we’re going to go deep on Control!
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Before we start, I highly recommend you complete Control 101 AND Control 201.
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Like a said, this is going to get really detailed, really fast, so do your homework first.
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Let’s start with some basics. Control can be as simple as GPIO for controlling devices such as microphones.
00:37
We press a button on a microphone when we want it to mute it, and then press it again when you want to unmute.
00:42
GPIO can also control the LED on that microphone to show red for muted and green for unmuted.
00:49
Then we have Q-SYS native control with our touchscreens
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and user interfaces that can be included as part of the control system.
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Q-SYS can also receive incoming control from 3rd party control systems such as Crestron,
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AMX, Extron and other devices that can be part of the design.
01:07
And finally, we have outgoing controls from Q-SYS to other devices.
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Once our system receives control signals from these methods, then we can then have programming
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comprised of simple control components, plug-ins, or scripts provide the functionality we need.
01:23
Our objectives for these videos will be to take a look at these different control methods with a little more detail,
01:29
see how they are applied, and then provide some basic trouble guidelines.
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Let’s start with the control signals in and out of Q-SYS, these signal types include:
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Ethernet, GPIO, and RS232 or serial.
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With serial connections,
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Q-SYS provides bi-directional RS232 ports on either a Phoenix connector or a DB-9 style connector,
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just like the Data Terminal Equipment (or DTE connection) on a PC.
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If your design requires a different type of serial connection such as an RS485 or RS422,
02:06
then we typically recommend you go with an Ethernet-based 3rd party control device.
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Serial connections on I/O-22’s and most Q-SYS Core’s have a DB9 male DTE connector.
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When connecting to a DCE device with a female connector,
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a male to female straight through cable can be used.
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When connecting Q-SYS to another DTE male connection,
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then we will need a female to female cross over or a “null modem” cable.
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Other serial connectors on Q-SYS devices such as on the IO-8 flex
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and the Core 110f have a three pin Phoenix connector,
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so for troubleshooting purposes,
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this makes it a lot easier if we need to swap to transmit/receive connectors.
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So pop quiz: Do Q-SYS serial ports support flow control? Here’s a hint: there are two types of flow controls.
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One is hardware based, and as I mentioned earlier, we only use transmit,
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receive and ground connections and not the additional RS-232 pins required for flow control.
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So NO on hardware based flow control.
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And while it would be possible technically to code some sort of Lua script flow control,
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there's no native support for software based flow control.
03:21
So in order to add Serial control to your design, you will need to add the Serial Port component of a Q-SYS
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device from your inventory to the schematic and create one (and only one) connection to a control component
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that will run on the Core.
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Remember: You cannot daisy chain RS-232 signals!
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In this example design, if you open the Command Buttons component,
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you can see our Serial Port configuration of 9600, 8, none and 1.
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This is a very common Serial Port configuration.
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In this case, 9600 refers to the Baud Rate, we have 8 data bits, no parity represented by the “N”, and 1 stop bit.
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So, if we look at the data flow of this serial signal at the bottom, we start at idle with the transmit pin held high.
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Then the start bit goes low and then we see the waveform for this piece of data
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followed by the stop bit as a high.
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For the next transmission,
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we see the stop bit again and this pattern will continue for every character of a string to be sent out.
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So in our example, the first Byte of our transmission is 08 Hex,
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this is literally what the signal would look like from position D0 to D7 for our 8 data bits.
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Since we are configured for 8 data bits, we know that when we start the start bit,
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to look for 8 data bits at 9600 baud speed, then we have our stop bit, then we see the start bit for the next order to
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signal the start of the second data transmission, et cetera.
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Now, if we employ parity in our serial signal, typically we would see one less data bit to follow for our parity bit,
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so it reduces the number of actual data bits to 7.
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In our example we have Even parity, so if the sum of our data bit is odd,
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then my parity bit goes high to make our Data Bit sum an even number.
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If our Parity bit was set to odd, the Parity Bit would be low to produce a sum that is odd.
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The most common serial configuration is 8, none, and 1, but in rare cases, parity may be required.
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Since Q-SYS does not support serial control from 3rd party devices natively,
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we need to add this functionality to our Q-SYS design.
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To do this, we need to add a Serial to TCP Script to the schematic.
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Then we will need to add that script to the Q-Sys device’s serial connection.
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Since this control utilizes a script, keep in mind that a scripting license will be required.
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Alright, that seems like a good place to stop.
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When we get back, we’ll open up Q-SYS Designer software
06:14
and show you how to configure Serial Communication GPIO in Q-SYS. See you then!
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Introduction to Q-SYS Control (Part 1)
6m 23s