Lesson Description
Build an Interface
9m 46s
Step-by-step guide to creating an interactive map of your room to simplify your deployment
Transcript
Build an Interface
9m 46s
00:06
All right, here's when it all comes together.
00:09
We are going to build an intuitive,
00:13
easy interface here in the designer that will
00:15
make the commissioning stage so much easier
00:18
than if you try to jump around back and forth
00:20
in the software without these tips, tricks,
00:23
and best practices.
00:24
Hopefully, we will be able to give you these
00:27
in the next 10 minutes or so.
00:29
First thing I'm going to do is jump to page
00:31
two here in the design, back to our map that
00:34
we had built out, and we're going to start making
00:37
this into something far more useful than it is now.
00:40
First, I'm going to go to the video bridge of my
00:44
Mediacast router.
00:45
I'm going to grab the camera preview window and
00:48
all of its controls.
00:50
Let's copy that and drop it onto the page.
00:52
I'm going to put it right in the middle of the
00:54
space so it's always in a convenient place for me to look.
00:57
I don't really need to see that microphone icon anymore.
00:59
That looks pretty good to me.
01:01
Next, I'm going to divide this space into zones
01:06
that match what it looked like in our napkin sketch.
01:10
I'm going to use the polygon tool for this.
01:12
The polygon tool doesn't get a lot of love in the software;
01:14
it's only used a couple of times.
01:15
Sometimes people don't really know what it's for at all.
01:18
I'm going to use this to create some regions
01:20
that will light up and let me know when
01:23
that zone is currently active.
01:26
So, I'm going to use my polygon tool to build out my zones.
01:31
That's zone one.
01:32
Remember, I'm sitting right about here in our space
01:35
in the real world based on our napkin sketch.
01:37
That means that zone two is the one to my right like this,
01:43
and then zone three is over on this side.
01:45
Referring to my original napkin sketch,
01:48
you'll notice that I am making sure these all
01:51
radiate outward from the very center of our microphone.
01:54
That's because we know that all the angles of this
01:57
room are determined by that microphone
01:59
detecting things in 360° around it.
02:02
So, it is going to look like a spiderweb or a pie,
02:06
or whatever your analogy preference is.
02:10
Mine's going to look something like this.
02:11
I'm not caring too much about getting these exact;
02:14
this is not a UCI we're building for the end user to use.
02:16
This is just for us to rough cut the room so that
02:19
we can make our life a little easier.
02:21
I'm going to select all of these and then send
02:23
them to the back so we can see my objects behind them.
02:27
Next, I'm going to go back to my plugin and grab
02:31
each of the zone controls for our zones.
02:36
These are all the controls for zone one.
02:39
I'll copy those and drop them into the zone one section.
02:43
Same thing for zone two.
02:45
I'm going to do this for each one of these,
02:46
that way I don't have to dig around,
02:49
jump into the plugin, go back again,
02:51
change the tab I'm looking at,
02:53
open and close control panels.
02:55
I don't want to do any of that.
02:55
I want everything on one screen.
02:58
It's going to make everything about my life easier,
03:03
and that way, when we commission it,
03:04
we don't need to leave that page.
03:06
We can just stay there and not drive ourselves crazy running around.
03:14
Make sure you grab all of these controls,
03:15
by the way.
03:16
You don't want to realize that you left an LED
03:18
behind or something like that and wonder where it is later.
03:21
Here's zone six.
03:23
We're going to drop that in here and
03:25
do it right a little bit up there.
03:27
I put these close to the preview window on purpose
03:30
because I know I want to be able to see
03:31
those all at the same time.
03:32
I'm going to zoom in later,
03:33
and that'll make my life even easier as well.
03:36
All right, now the key to what makes this cool
03:38
is that we're going to use that active LED
03:41
for each of the zones and apply its properties
03:44
to the polygon behind it.
03:46
We know that active LED will light up
03:48
when audio is detected in that region.
03:50
We know it'll turn blue when that region is in hysteresis.
03:53
I want that entire part of my map to
03:55
light up to let me know that it's working.
03:57
So, I'm going to grab the LED and move it a little bit.
04:00
Because I'm moving it,
04:02
my mouse is still clicked down.
04:04
It's hovered over the polygon,
04:05
and you can see that the designer software
04:07
is telling me to hold the control key to assign the
04:10
control to this region.
04:11
In this case, the region is the polygon.
04:13
I'm going to press down control,
04:15
release my mouse,
04:16
then I can release control.
04:18
You can see the color of the polygon has
04:20
changed because it's now taken on the properties
04:22
of that LED.
04:24
I know it looks like it's dark blue even
04:26
though the LED is red.
04:27
Once you emulate or push to a core,
04:29
those are going to line up nicely.
04:31
Let's do that for all six of our polygons:
04:34
just transfer the LED to the polygon.
04:40
That way, we've got this nice,
04:41
beautiful map that's going to light up for
04:43
us and be a clear visual indicator of
04:47
what's happening in the room.
04:48
There are a lot of other things we should
04:49
pull onto this interface as well.
04:52
It's a good idea to grab the Mediacast routing
04:56
buttons as well.
04:57
So, I'll open up my Mediacast router.
04:59
If you haven't done this already,
05:00
I'd recommend that you change the Mediacast router
05:03
properties of image buttons to yes.
05:06
When they're in the yes state,
05:07
these buttons will be replaced with an
05:09
actual little preview image of what the camera is seeing.
05:13
That way, you have more confidence in knowing
05:15
which of those camera shots you're pulling up.
05:17
I want buttons for one, two, three, four, nine, and ten.
05:22
Those are my camera buttons.
05:24
I'm just going to put those off to the side so
05:26
if I need to pull up a camera, I certainly can.
05:29
Let's stack these and make them much larger
05:33
so that when they are a preview image,
05:36
it will be a lot easier to see what they are.
05:39
I also want to go and grab all these LEDs
05:42
that we grabbed previously for our cameras
05:44
because I want to know which camera is on
05:47
while we are looking at our map.
05:49
So, I'm going to bring those over here.
05:51
Let's make these nice and big too.
05:55
Let's make these like 50 by 50.
05:57
That's a lot bigger.
06:00
The first one, let me zoom out a little more here,
06:03
is our indicator for camera one.
06:07
This is for primary position two,
06:10
this is position three, and this is our NC110.
06:14
Then these are our secondary cameras
06:16
for position one and position two.
06:18
Now I've got these nice big LEDs on the screen
06:20
that let me know which camera is active.
06:23
There are also some controls from inside
06:24
the plugin that we want.
06:26
It's very important to grab these ones:
06:29
the horizontal and vertical angle.
06:31
We're going to be using these primarily
06:33
to set up our zones.
06:35
I'm going to drop these down here.
06:36
I'm going to make these the most
06:38
important thing that I can see.
06:39
So, let's make their font size 36.
06:44
That's a lot bigger.
06:45
Yes, and then we can just expand those.
06:48
There we go.
06:48
I can really clearly see what my incoming angles
06:50
are going to be right there.
06:51
I also want to grab the indicator that
06:55
the local mic has reached its threshold or the
06:58
far-end mic has reached its threshold.
06:59
That way, as we're talking,
07:01
we can make sure that we can see that the
07:06
zone is actually detecting audio in the room.
07:09
Okay, so we've got everything on this page
07:11
that we need in order to commission this system.
07:14
There are a couple of things you might
07:15
want to consider before you actually push to the core.
07:18
Here's one that's caught me before:
07:21
I previously engaged auto-framing on one of my cameras.
07:24
Well, if I start trying to line up my shots right now
07:28
and I'm in that shot,
07:29
then the camera is going to frame
07:32
me and crop me out.
07:33
The image I'm going to be seeing from that
07:35
camera is not actually where the camera is aimed.
07:37
I want to turn off auto-framing during the
07:39
commissioning stage here.
07:40
I'll turn that back on when we're done.
07:42
Now, you could just go in there and click
07:44
auto-framing and turn it off for every single
07:46
one of your cameras and then go back and turn it on later.
07:49
That's fine.
07:49
But you might forget to do it.
07:51
I've forgotten to do it before,
07:53
and then you forget either to engage it when
07:55
you're done or disengage it,
07:56
and you're not sure why you're getting a weird shot.
07:59
Something that I like to do is actually
08:00
build in a little safeguard for myself.
08:03
I'm going to go back to our plugin,
08:07
and whenever the plugin is bypassed,
08:10
which we're going to do,
08:10
which we're going to do,
08:12
we're bypassing the plugin while
08:13
we're commissioning it.
08:14
I'm going to use that as a method to turn
08:17
off the auto-framing on the cameras.
08:19
Remember, I exposed the tracking bypass pin earlier.
08:24
Let's grab ourselves a control function and
08:27
set this to be a logic NOT with a one input pin.
08:34
That way, whenever it is not bypassed, meaning
08:38
that it's on, we'll call this auto-framing on.
08:44
Let me take all of these guys.
08:46
They each have a control pin for auto-framing
08:50
called enable,
08:51
and I want to make sure that it is enabled
08:55
when the bypass is off.
08:58
So, I'll copy this and just paste it to
09:00
all these control pins.
09:02
One, two, three, four, five, six. Voila.
09:08
These LEDs I can reposition if I so desire.
09:10
That took me one second to enable this,
09:13
but now I don't have to worry about getting it wrong,
09:16
forgetting to turn on or off my auto-framing
09:19
when I'm commissioning or not.
09:21
That's a nice little workaround that I've discovered.
09:23
Now, in the next version of the software,
09:26
we are actually going to have a button within
09:28
the ACPR plugin that will do this for you,
09:31
but I'm still going to do it this way for now.
09:32
I'm going to cover my butt and make
09:34
sure that I don't have any problems.
09:36
We are now ready to push to the core.
09:39
So, let's go to File, Save to Core,and Run,
09:42
and we're going to do this for real.