How do I display a UDP message using a Live Text state in BrightAuthor?

Last Updated: September 18, 2014

Follow these steps to display and update Live Text fields using UDP messages:

1. In BrightAuthor, create the required number of User Variables: Go to the File > Presentation Properties > Variables tab and click the Add Variable button to create each user variable. Then click OK.

Note: In this example, three dots are used for the Default Value, but you can use whatever value you like.

2. Drag and drop a Live Text state onto an interactive playlist.

3. Select User variable for the item Type, then select the corresponding User Variable(“cell1” in this example).

4. Click Add Item to add more text widgets to the Live Text canvas, and then assign the remaining User Variables to these widgets. Click OK when you’ve added all the required widgets.

5. Under the Media Library > events tab, drag and drop the UDP Input event onto the Live Text widget.

6. In the UDP Input Event window, enter "<any>” (without the quotation marks) into the Specify UDP input field.

7. Select Transition to new state.

8. Under the Advanced tab for the UDP Input event, select the Assign input to variable? option and make sure that the Input specifies variable option is selected. Click OK.

Your playlist should look like this:

9. Publish the presentation to the player.

Sending UDP messages

You can use any application capable of sending UDP messages to display your UDP messages on screen.

This example uses Hercules to send UDP messages to the networked player(s) playing the above presentation.

1. Open Hercules and go to the UDP tab.
2. Under Module IP, enter the BrightSign player IP address and port 5000 (this is the default UDP sender and receiver port on recent BrightAuthor versions)
3. Under the server settings make sure to deselect Server echo, Redirect to TCP Server, and Redirect to TCP client.
4. At the bottom under the Send section enter “cell1:new message” and click Send to display “new message” on the BrightSign player. The string consists of "User Variable:the message".
5. You can also use one UDP string to update multiple Live Text items at the same time. To do so, you need to separate each message with a “!!”. For example, you can enter “cell1:my message!!cell2:my other message!!cell3:yet another message” and click Send.

If you want to broadcast a UDP message to all the BrightSign players on the same subnet, you can replace the IP address of the player with a broadcast address such as “192.168.1.255”.

See the link below for a BA 3.5.0.31 project to get you started with testing:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/63797599/RomeoBrightSign/LiveText_UDP_Update.zip