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Conditional Branching w/RS232 control

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Dick Trump
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I'm creating a system that will need to step through a number of slides and a single video, mostly in sequence. At one point in the sequence, there will be an option of up to 5 different sequences to branch to. This will all be under control of an external control system with either RS232 or UDP messaging. The client will be changing slides in the field. The control system will not have any knowledge of how many slides in certain sequences, so I will send a message back to the control system when the end of a sequence is reached. I can do all of that with either CSV style programming or BrightAuthor. Pretty simple stuff except for one little catch. The client may need to change the number of slides in some of the sequences. I would prefer that they not have to do any reprogramming to accomplish this. Ideally, the programming on the Brightsign would detect that the next file in a sequence (ie. Q1.jpg, Q2.jpg, Q3.jpg, Q4.jpg but no Q5) and send the message back to the control system telling it that it had reached the last slide. One compromise would be to have a separate configuration file that defined the number of slides in each of several different sequences. I've looked at the Control.zip file as a possible starting point, but apparently this doesn't support JPG images. Is there some technical reason for that? Or is it just a matter of expanding on the BRS script? Do you have any other suggestions? Dick
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    RokuLyndon


    I think my newer control control script does have image support. I originally wrote the script to control videos. I don't believe I defined playlists in the control script.

    So, is the control system sending a command like, "play all files that start with Q"?
  • 0
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    Dick Trump


    No - not quite that simple.  The control system will have a touch panel for user input and will control other devices such as lighting, video recorders, cameras, etc.  Each variable sequence will have touchscreen prompts that need to change when it gets to the end of a sequence.  So the touch screen might prompt "Next" 5 times in one of the sequences, 3 in another, etc.  But with a different set of files, the number of prompts would change.  That's the reason for the need of feedback to the controller.

    I'm working on an alternate plan to build a PC application that will simply have spinners to determine how many items in each sequence.  The app would then automatically generate the CSV file.  Since the filenames will follow a very structured naming convention, an alternate way would be to have the application scan a directory for the presence of the filenames and automatically create the CSV.
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    RokuLyndon


    I don't know if I'm a little fuzzy this morning, but I'm still not quite clear what you want the brightsign to do. can you spell out what a couple sequences would look like, including what you'd send to the brightsign, and what the brightsign would send back? You mentioned sending next x number of times. How does the brightsign know what file to play, the file name?
  • 0
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    Dick Trump


    I understand that my explanation isn't terribly clear.  You kind of need to know the whole structure of the system to have it make sense.

    I've been giving it further thought and I see a problem with having to put all the intelligence in the Brightsign programming.  Although having a duplicate Brightsign for authoring wouldn't be a problem, it wouldn't be practical to replicate the rest of the system.  The end system will be traveling around the country while screen creation and "authoring" will need to happen in an office somewhere.

    I've decided the best approach is to create a PC application that will automatically generate the CSV file based on the files found in a folder.  I can have it display thumbnails of the structure for confirmation.  I would feel much more confident doing it that way.

    Thanks for giving it some thought.

    Dick
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