How do I display a UDP message using a Live Text state with BrightAuthor:connected?

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

1. In BrightAuthor:connected, create the required number of User Variables by going to Presentation Settings > Variables 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 any value is acceptable.

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 under User Variable Options (“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. Navigate back to the interactive zone where the Live Text state is located. 

5. Drag and drop the UDP event onto the Live Text widget from Events.

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

Note: Text in the Label field is up to the user. 

7. Select Transition to new state under Target State.

8. In Event Properties select the Assign input to variable option and make sure that the Input specifies variable option is selected. 

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 the 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 BrightAuthor:connected)
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”.