DMS Text Lists

egcarter

I have recently undergone the ordeal of upgrading a Landmark system with a bunch of DMS keypads to NetLinx. What technique would you folks recommend for sending text lists to the DMS keypads for selection? Such as CD artist-titles, cable channel names, radio station names, etc?

The user could scroll up or down through the list and select something to play by pushing the corresponding button.

For example, there is a Sony 300 CD changer in the system and right now it has transport control, next/prev track, next/prev disc, etc. They want the artist-title info to select from. Landmark had that ability built right in...gotta code it in NetLinx now.

Eric

DHawthorne

You have two choices. If your lists are reasonably static and not very long, you can create a variable text array to hold the entire list. The scroll buttons on the DMS will then intrnally handle navigating your list. It will, however use a ton of memory and updating that list is awkward.

The other method is you simply have a list that consists of the visible buttons as variable text fields, and you track what is displayed in code, and refresh it when changes are made or navigation throught the list occurs. This is much more code to write, and, frankly, DMS refreshes are rather slow done this way, especially since you have to refresh the page whenever you change a variable text field. Because the devices are slow, you absolutely do not want to do this every time one of the list items change, but make sure you have all the changes on the page made, then refresh the page. One other zinger is that the arrow buttons will not work on older keypads, and there is no upgrade path. There is an AMX Tech not on this someplace that will tell you what revision will work.

There are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. I eagerly await the Duet module that was said to exist for DMS keypads, hoping desperately it will overcome the shortcomings in this product. I have quite a lot of them out there, leftover from older Landmark systems.