Lesson Description
Part A: E-mailer Component
6m 30s
Set-up the E-mailer component to send alerts via email regarding critical system warning.
Video Transcript
Part A: E-mailer Component
6m 30s
0:08
The Q-Sys Designer lets you monitor your system and track any potential issues in a variety of ways:
0:13
You have constant access to the Status of all your Inventory items through your UCI,
0:18
the Event Log records all notable activity on the network,
0:22
but what you might not have known is that it can also contact you.
0:26
Let’s take a look at a simple component with a lot of potential – the E-Mailer.
0:30
Open up your Schematic Library in the Right-Side Pane, look under Control Components,
0:35
and drag the E-mailer component into your Schematic.
0:39
Double-click it to open its Control Panel. I’m going to run this design to the Core so that I can test it out.
0:45
This looks like any e-mail you probably already use – first you type in the e-mail address of your recipient
0:51
and separate multiple recipients with a semicolon, comma, or space.
0:55
Give your e-mail a relevant subject, and fill in the Message section.
1:00
You can send the e-mail by clicking the Send button at the top,
1:03
and then the Status block will let you know if the e-mail was successful or, if not, why it was unsuccessful.
1:08
The bottom half of the control panel is the Configure pane,
1:11
which you must set to match your outgoing e-mail’s settings.
1:14
Type your e-mail in the From field - If the recipient of your e-mail hits Reply,
1:19
it will be sent to whatever address you put here.
1:21
If your outgoing mail is password protected you can input that password here,
1:25
and you must also input the IP address of your outgoing SMTP mail server.
1:30
Don’t use a server name unless the Core is configured to use
1:34
DHCP and the DHCP server provides a name server address.
1:39
If you need to change the port of this server, simply add a colon at the end of the address and input your port.
1:46
If your mail service requires SSL, enable this button here.
1:50
That’s everything there is to the E-Mailer component
1:52
it doesn’t even have any editable Properties besides its position and Color.
1:56
It will only work when you’re running on a Core, and while you could use it to manually e-mail someone,
2:01
its real power is in wiring it to send out alert e-mails automatically.
2:07
Let’s take a fairly typical example – you want to be notified of a Fault in an inventory item.
2:12
If a Core or an Amplifier’s status drops from OK, you want to know about it.
2:16
Let’s look at how you could accomplish this.
2:19
Let me disconnect from the Core and look at my Inventory – I have a Core and an Amplifier,
2:25
and I’m going to pull both their Status Components into the Schematic.
2:29
For each of them, I’ll go to the Right-Side Pane, expand the Control Pins window,
2:33
and activate the Status Control Pin. If you have more than one inventory item you want to monitor,
2:38
you may not want to set up a different e-mailer for every single one.
2:42
Instead let’s go to the Schematic Library again, under Control Components, and bring in a Status Combiner.
2:50
You can wire the control pins of any inventory’s status to this Status Combiner,
2:54
and it will compile them together to let you know if there’s a problem with any of them.
2:58
Now, if anything goes wrong, this Fault LED will light up – well I want that LED to trigger the E-mailer.
3:12
Next we have to create a trigger – pull in a Custom Controls component,
3:16
and we’ll use it to create one Momentary Button – that means that the moment this button is activated,
3:22
it will send one impulse to whatever it is connected to. Wire the Fault Control Pin to the Momentary Button
3:29
now when there’s any fault in the system, this button will trigger.
3:33
Let’s go to our E-Mailer component and open some of its Control Pins
3:36
we want to be able to control the Send button, and we also want to edit the Message that it sends.
3:42
We’ll wire the trigger we’ve created to the Send button
3:45
but before it gets there I’m actually going to bring in a Control Delay,
3:50
which simply adds a bit of time between when this button is triggered and when it fires.
3:56
You can adjust it between 0 and 10 seconds,
3:59
and the reason I’m doing this is because I want to make sure there’s
4:00
enough time for the system to compile a Log Event of the failure,
4:05
because that’s what we’ll use for the Message of the e-mail.
4:07
Pull in the Event Log component from the Schematic Library, and activate its Last Entry Control Pin.
4:14
Wire this to your E-mailer Message, and it will use the last created Log for the body of your e-mail.
4:20
If you’re unfamiliar with the Event Log, refresh yourself with what it does by
4:24
watching our Administrator tutorial.So let’s review this entire chain
4:29
your Inventory items constantly send their Status to a Status Combiner.
4:33
If any of them are at a Fault, the Fault LED will send a signal to this momentary button which,
4:38
after a five second delay, triggers an e-mail to send.
4:42
The e-mail consists of the last log entry of your system (which should be the inventory fault),
4:47
and it is sent to whomever you have established here in its Control Panel.
4:51
Let’s see this in action. The amplifier I added earlier doesn’t actually exist,
4:57
so when I run this to the Core it’s going to report a Fault for the status of that amplifier.
5:04
Then after five seconds we’ll see the E-mailer start to send its message,
5:09
and here in my inbox I’ll find the error log. Just that simple.
5:14
As I said, this is just one way to do it. If you’re familiar with Lua Scripting,
5:18
you could customize this process by using the Control Script component.
5:22
In this design, we’ve taken the information not only from a Fault warning,
5:27
but also from a Compromised warning and an OK indicator and fed them into a Control Script.
5:33
In the code we can dictate what happens in each circumstance.
5:36
We’ve also built our own customized messages that are then fed to the Message field of the E-mailer
5:42
rather than using the last Event Log. Feel free to download this Project File from qsctraining.com
5:48
if you want to get a closer look at how we scripted that to work.
5:51
Here’s another example, in which the user could customize the recipients of the e-mail from a UCI.
5:56
Rather than inputting all the names in one group text field, each recipient receives their own e-mail.
6:02
In this scenario, a speaker fault triggers a button which launches a send command to every e-mailer,
6:10
which receive their recipient name from the text field of the UCI.
6:14
This project file is also available to download.
6:17
Hopefully this gives you an idea of the possibilities for using the Emailer component,
6:21
and how to keep you or your User connected to any urgent events in the system.
6:25
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.
Helpful Tips and Definitions
Part A: E-mailer Component
6m 30s
Status Combiner: This component compiles the statuses of multiple inventory devices to quickly determine if there is potential issue with any of them.
Control Delay: This component adds a customizable delay between when a control is initiated and when it is executed.
- You can enter multiple e-mail addresses separated with a comma, space, or semi-colon to send an e-mail to more than one recipient.
- When configuring your outgoing e-mail settings, you must use an IP address rather than a server name unless your Core is configured to use DHCP.
- To change a port, add a colon after the server settings and then input the new Port.
- You can use the Last Entry of the Event Log to populate the Message of your e-mail by wiring their Control Pins together.
Downloads and Links
Part A: E-mailer Component
6m 30s