Video Transcript
Command Buttons
12m 5s
00:06
All right, welcome back.
00:07
So, we were just saying,
00:09
what if we wanted to make our life even easier
00:12
by having just a single button that automatically
00:16
preloads all of the decisions we’ve made?
00:18
So, you’ve got a message that’s consistently
00:20
going out to the same rooms,
00:22
with the same message at the same priority level.
00:24
You don’t want to have your user pick that manually
00:27
every single time and send it; you want a single button.
00:30
“Well, Nate,” you say, addressing me on a first-name basis,
00:36
which I did not allow, “why wouldn’t you just use a snapshot bank for that?”
00:40
“That’s a brilliant idea, Jimmy,”
00:43
I say, not caring what your actual name is,
00:47
except for the fact that a snapshot bank is only
00:51
going to be relevant to this particular virtual page station.
00:55
I could certainly grab a snapshot bank and have it
00:58
record everything that’s in this control panel,
01:00
and then I could hit that load button,
01:03
and all those options will be preloaded exactly
01:06
the way you wanted them to.
01:07
That’s fine. What if you’ve got more than one virtual page station?
01:12
You would then have to have multiple snapshot
01:15
banks for each of those virtual page stations,
01:17
and then you’d have to save that configuration
01:20
for every single possible virtual page station so
01:22
that anyone who’s using this system from anywhere
01:24
all have access to the same possible configuration
01:27
of those announcements. That’s a lot of time.
01:30
I’d much rather have a button that does it,
01:33
that can be given to any of those virtual page stations.
01:36
The same is true with the physical page station.
01:39
The physical page station, you may recall,
01:41
has this keypad on the front,
01:43
and that keypad does not give you the breadth of
01:46
detail that you can choose from everything that I just put onto my UCI.
01:50
I’ve got numbers, and I’ve got some buttons on the side
01:54
that are designed explicitly for this.
01:57
What we’re about to talk about:
01:58
we’re going to be creating commands.
02:00
A command is all of the things we just talked about,
02:04
everything wrapped up into one,
02:07
so that it can be launched from a physical page station
02:10
or from a virtual page station.
02:12
It’s one button, and then you can hit it and send it along. It’s merry.
02:16
So, what I need to do first is I’m going to disconnect,
02:20
actually, from the core, and we’re going to make some
02:22
adjustments to our virtual page station.
02:25
The virtual page station has some properties which
02:27
we didn’t talk about earlier.
02:28
I said we were going to expand the control panel to
02:30
make it a little bit more exhaustive.
02:32
We’re going to do that now.
02:33
So, we have something called command button counts.
02:37
I’m going to make that command button count four,
02:40
and when I do that, you’ll notice that the control panel has changed.
02:44
I now have a section called command buttons,
02:46
and I have four buttons: A, B, C, and D, and this other
02:50
button that says ad hoc. We’ve already made this much larger now.
02:55
These command buttons, I’m going to say right now,
02:59
might be a little confusing because if you are in the
03:03
schematic elements library and you type in command buttons,
03:07
you are going to find a component called command buttons.
03:11
This command button has absolutely nothing to do with the paging system.
03:16
This command button component is used,
03:19
if you’re familiar with any of our other trainings that cover them,
03:21
to send a string to a third-party device via either a TCP
03:27
connection or a serial connection to make that device do something.
03:30
This is useful for things like changing the lights in a lighting control system,
03:35
changing shades, turning a projector on and off,
03:38
sending commands to TVs—anything that you just need
03:40
to send a one-way communication to a third-party device.
03:43
You can do it with this, but it’s not the same thing as
03:48
these command buttons. We have two things in CUS
03:52
that are both called command buttons, and it drives me crazy.
03:57
So, I’m just going to pretend this command button doesn’t
04:00
exist at all, and when we talk about command buttons here,
04:03
we’re talking just about the paging command buttons—
04:06
buttons that launch commands that are saved in the administrator.
04:11
All right, so the other thing I want to do while we’re here
04:14
editing our virtual page station is I can make some other changes.
04:18
I said earlier that I don’t really love these zone buttons.
04:21
I could choose to hide them.
04:23
If I hide those zone buttons, well,
04:25
how can I choose what zones I want?
04:27
Well, I could go to my zone group count.
04:30
I’m going to add, um, I’m going to say seven to my zone group counts.
04:36
I now have another batch of controls down here called zone groups,
04:39
and zone groups do the same thing that the zone buttons do.
04:42
They let you choose the destinations you’re going to send something to,
04:45
but each of these buttons will be determined
04:48
by this drop-down menu beneath it.
04:51
I’m actually going to leave my zone buttons shown
04:54
as we go through this just because I want to show you what it’s doing.
04:57
I’m going to save the core and run again,
04:59
and we will see what those group buttons allow us to do.
05:03
Okay, we’re connected.
05:04
So, with the drop-down menu beneath each of the zone groups,
05:07
I can choose from any of the zone names that we configured
05:11
in the administrator or any of the tags.
05:14
So, I could make the first five the same zones that I had earlier:
05:20
my lobby, my conference, and my NPR one, two, and three.
05:25
Then, I could use my other ones for the tags I created.
05:28
This is all NPR, and that’s conference room.
05:35
When you engage that zone group,
05:37
all of the zones that it is associated with will engage.
05:40
So, if I click all NPR, look, all of my zones engaged,
05:43
including zone one, because I turned that on independently.
05:47
If I clear them all, I could choose all of my, uh, oops,
05:51
wrong one, that’s supposed to be floor one.
05:53
If I engage my floor one, boom, all of those are engaged.
05:57
If I choose NPR1 group, you know, zone three engaged.
06:00
This will give you a little bit more specificity on which zone
06:04
or groups of zones you want to give, and it’s a button.
06:07
You put that in the UCI.
06:08
You could theoretically just give the user one of these drop-down menus.
06:16
Oh, how about that?
06:17
You don’t need to have them have lots of buttons to choose from.
06:20
Just have a drop-down menu, and they choose the one that they want.
06:23
You don’t even need to give them that button at all.
06:25
Just give them the drop-down menu, and it selects them for them.
06:28
So, that’s an option too.
06:30
Not what we’re talking about right now, but just something to think about.
06:32
All right, we’re talking about commands,
06:35
and here are our command buttons.
06:36
They’re currently grayed out.
06:38
We have to create the commands in the administrator.
06:41
So, first things first, we’re going to go back to the administrator,
06:44
and we’re going to go down here to the commands tab.
06:47
When you didn’t have a PA system in your design,
06:51
you would probably use the commands tab to either
06:54
load snapshots and schedule that snapshot to occur
06:57
in your command schedule or maybe to change a control.
07:01
Well, now that we’ve got a PA system, if you hit the plus button,
07:04
we’ve got a couple more options:
07:05
PA page command and PA play message command.
07:08
These do exactly what you probably think they should do.
07:11
If you create the page command,
07:13
you can fine-tune all of the settings to make a page.
07:16
These are all the things that we just saw in the virtual page station.
07:20
You’ve got the ability to choose the preamble,
07:23
you’ve got the ability to choose what zones or tags
07:26
you’re going to send it to, and it’s got a couple of other things as well.
07:29
So, at the top, you can choose a name for it,
07:32
you can choose a code for it.
07:34
The code is what you type into the keypad on the page station.
07:41
That’s why the keypad exists.
07:43
So, if I wanted to make a page with a code of 100,
07:46
I could do it that way.
07:47
In fact, I’m going to make a message this way.
07:49
I’ll make a PA play message command.
07:52
We’re going to call this the elevator call,
07:56
where we’ll play the elevator file.
07:58
That’s going to be code 100. We’ll send it at a high priority,
08:03
and we’ll send it to the lobby as well as all three NPRs.
08:08
We hit okay, we hit update, and we save that,
08:12
and now we’ve got a command.
08:15
I can go and once again engage my hover monitor on zone one.
08:21
I can go to my page station, I can type in 100.
08:26
It tells me the elevator call is ready to go.
08:29
I hit talk to issue, and ladies and gentlemen,
08:32
Fake Hotel would like to remind you that our elevators are also fake.
08:36
Please stop pressing the elevator call button and start climbing those stairs.
08:40
Thank you. That’s true.
08:43
So, that’s a way to send an announcement from the physical page station.
08:49
We created the command.
08:50
What we want to do is we want to then load that command
08:53
into something like the virtual page station’s commands.
08:56
That will be done back in the administrator.
08:59
We’re going to go to the page stations tab.
09:01
Here we see all the page stations that are in our design.
09:05
I’ve got my virtual page station, and I’ve got my physical page station.
09:09
Let’s open up the virtual page station.
09:12
Here, you’ve got some generic settings.
09:14
You can choose what priority level this page station is given.
09:19
Again, we’re in station user priority mode right now,
09:21
so the stations themselves get the priority that is sent out.
09:25
We’ll make this a high priority page station.
09:28
I want to go to the command buttons section of this.
09:30
Here are the four command buttons I created.
09:32
You can have more command buttons or fewer command
09:34
buttons at your discretion, and in each one,
09:37
I can choose which of my commands to load in.
09:40
I’ve only created the one, the elevator call,
09:43
so I’m going to load that one in, and I can then change its legend.
09:48
We heard legend before earlier, right? What’s the legend?
09:51
The legend is the label of a button.
09:53
Right now, if I look in my design, these command buttons are called A, B, C, and D.
10:00
These get automatically populated from the administrator.
10:04
So, if I am on this page and I say that this is going to be called elevator for the legend,
10:09
and then I update this, that gets propagated
10:11
forward to this as well.
10:14
That’ll make it much easier on you if you’ve
10:16
got a lot of virtual page stations.
10:18
You load that command, and it automatically
10:20
sends that name to the buttons as well,
10:22
so you don’t need to go through and try to
10:24
remember what you loaded onto each of
10:26
those commands and potentially get the name
10:27
wrong as you’re changing it.
10:28
You’ve got the word elevator there.
10:30
Now, you can just simply click that.
10:32
All of the settings of that elevator are pre-loaded,
10:35
and then you hit play, and it’s a one-button solution
10:38
to make that commonly sent announcement go out.
10:42
You could also do that with the physical page station.
10:45
If I go to my physical page station, I go to its command buttons.
10:49
It also has four command buttons: A, B, C, and D.
10:52
That’s what these buttons are here on the right side of the bank.
10:56
I’ve got my keypad in the middle and then A, B, C, and D on the side.
10:59
So, if I choose to load my elevator call into option A,
11:05
once again update that, then here on my physical page station,
11:09
I can press the A button. It says the zone is ready.
11:12
It says elevator call. I can hit talk, and that will send out as well.
11:17
Oh, I should say the other version of this, the 1650,
11:21
that doesn’t have a keypad, it just has 16 command buttons.
11:25
So, you have 16 options of basically a speed dial on a
11:29
common type of announcement that you want to send out.
11:32
Those are commands, and we have now added those to our virtual page station.
11:37
We can then put that button onto the UCI to make
11:40
things a little bit easier if that’s the way that you want to go.
11:43
What is ad hoc, you ask?
11:45
Well, ad hoc just returns you out of command
11:48
button mode and returns you back to the manual mode.
11:51
So, you could do a combination of this.
11:53
You could have it that when you choose a command button,
11:56
that sends it out, but you still have the ability to do manual things as well.
11:59
Totally up to you, however you want to handle it.