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How do I control a source selctor with logic source?

Here is the problem. My customer wants me to control 6 cable tv boxes from within LA. No problem. However as i have 60 channels for each box, and he wants an individual button for each channel on each box. Sure you can do this with logic sorces and presets, but that is a lot of presets. Is there any way to do a backwards LOGIC VALUE? and directly have the buttons control the state variable of the soruce selector?

Oh by the way, the reason I need the source selctor is that he wants to display the channel name on a custom control pannel, and the only way I can think of doing this is via named tone generators. Any ideas?

Comments

  • rob birchrob birch Posts: 106
    Are you using LA as the operating program or a BLU10.

    If using LA then use a matrix, place the crosspoints on a custom control page, select them all and link them as a 'radio'. Place labelling under each button to correspond to your channels.

    The customer can now select one channel at once and you have not got any complicated logic going on, just a quick link.

    Does that work for what you wanted to do?

    Cheers

    Rob
  • Dan LynchDan Lynch Posts: 472
    \Hannalee\ wrote:
    Sure you can do this with logic sorces and presets,

    You can? How? Unless somebody has released a HiQnet compatible cable box that I don't know about.

    How are you planning to actually control the devices? Serial? IR? For either of those, all you need is logic sources set to AutoOff that are all tied to a serial trigger. Push the button, squirt out the serial string, AutoOff resets the button.

    Unless I totally misunderstood your application.


    Dan

    *edit* Is this a case of not knowing about the AutoOff feature on the logic sources? It's in properties. The button can turn itself off after a period of time.
  • HannaleeHannalee Posts: 56
    Dan,

    Xantech makes a cool little rs232 to ir device which is programable via their dragon software.

    BTW, brilliant idea with the matrix, I totally forgot about them. The good news is that after I made a sample screen with all the buttons, the customer said \"wow taht's too damm many buttons\" and now I can just use a source selector, like I wanted to do all along :)
  • Dan LynchDan Lynch Posts: 472
    You win! When the customer asks for something dumb, just show them how dumb it really is.

    Just checking, you're not using presets for this, correct?

    For anyone else who is reading this but who doesn't know what we're talking about, we need to output serial strings to drive a xantech serial to IR converter. There are 6 cable boxes to be controlled and each box has 60 channels. So we need to squirt out 360 different serial strings without working too hard. For this application you could use an audio SOURCE MATRIX 60x6 linked to 6 different LOGIC VALUE objects which are each wired to a SERIAL TRIGGER/TABLE.

    1) Wire the SOURCE MATRIX to nothing (or to a tone and meter, whatever) because all you're going to do with it is use the control panel objects.
    2) Grab the first selector from the source matrix and link it to the first LOGIC VALUE using the link command or drag&drop. This will cause the output of the logic value to show you which source is currently selected for that output on the source matrix.
    3) Wire the output of the logic value to the serial trigger/table so the table will squirt out the right serial command for each selected source. When you select channel 3 on output 1 of the source matrix, the logic end will drive the serial trigger/table to squirt out the serial string which sets cable box #1 to channel 3.
    4) Repeat this for the other 5 selectors on the source matrix.

    The reason you want to use a 60x6 SOURCE MATRIX instead of 6 source selectors is that a source matrix allows you type in the name for each source so you don't have to waste DSP with a bunch of named tone generators. Type the names once and they'll show up on all of the selectors. This will let you use long, descriptive channel names without needing to type each one in multiple times. Just change the size of the control panel object so you can read the long channel names.

    Does that make as much sense as I think it does?

    Dan
  • Dan LynchDan Lynch Posts: 472
    It's been pointed out to me that I missed something about the source selectors. I used a source matrix in this example so that I only needed to type in the names of the sources once. You could do the same thing with 6 source selectors by typing the names into the control panel object of the first source selector and then using the CopyProperties and PasteProperties commands to copy these name changes to the other source selectors. For anyone who doesn't know about those commands, just right-click on control panel object and you'll see them.

    I still prefer the source matrix in this case so that if I make a change to input #38, I know that it's been updated for all 6 outputs. It does definitely work either way though.

    Dan
  • HannaleeHannalee Posts: 56
    Dan,

    As I have the extra CPU availaible, I am using 6 source selectors and 80 noise generators, the project has grown a bit. It also seems that the IR unit has changed. Now I will be driving the unit which will send out the IR commands via the 6 output logic ports the blu-80. It is doable, but will be quite messy as I have to send the data in multiple packets to the IR controller to assemble into the proper command.

    Of course if we had a real way of programming the BLU-80, ie via some type programing language, it would be trivial

    I would like that an ability to program the functions of the blu-80 dirrectly.
    Trying to do in logic what is very easy with almost any programing language is really tedious.


    BTW, have you ever tried to remote access the PC that is running LA? I am thinking about doing this in a upcoming job and was wondering how it worked?
  • GrahamGraham Posts: 27
    \Hannalee\ wrote:
    BTW, have you ever tried to remote access the PC that is running LA? I am thinking about doing this in a upcoming job and was wondering how it worked?

    We regularly use Windows Remote Desktop Connection which is built in to Windows XP Professional to control PC's running London Architect, both on a Local LAN, and over the internet. Depending on the connection speed London Architect remains responsive. We have always connected at speeds 2Mbit and above.

    Graham
    BSS R&D
  • HannaleeHannalee Posts: 56
    Cool, I will have a 10/100 network which will only have 2 pc's and 2 blu-80s, seems like it should be no problem...
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