Switching Studios With Momentary LIO/LED and Console Spare Buttons
The Spare Button LEDs on Wheatstone consoles can be turned on by various methods. By default, the surface itself turns a spare button's LED on when the button is pressed. But sometimes you want the LED to display some kind of status such as when you put a different console on the air temporarily, or when some other function is in a particular mode. Here's a description of the studio switch scenario that also explains how to use an SLIO to turn on a spare button's LED.
Let’s say you want to push one of the spare buttons on your console, and have the input to your air chain switch from the Studio A PGM output (STAPGM) to the Studio B PGM (STBPGM) output so you can completely bypass Studio A in order to perform some needed maintenance in that room.
You need a few things to happen:
First, we’ll need to find two spare buttons we can use. One to put Studio A on the air, the other to put Studio B on the air.
• We’ll need to change the crosspoint to the airchain input (this will be a destination; we’ll assume it’s a delay unit and call it DELAY1). We’re changing it so that instead of STAPGM→DELAY1 we will have STBPGM→DELAY1.
• Turn the LED on for the button we just pressed to indicate that Studio B is now on the air.
• Turn the LED off for the button that indicates Studio A is on the air.
We want to do all of this with the press of a single button. It can be easily accomplished with the use of a salvo.
Let’s first create two salvos. One will put A on the air, the other will put B on the air. Call the first salvo “AToAir” and the second “BToAir.” In the first salvo, make one crosspoint from the STAPGM source to the DELAY1 destination.
In the second salvo, make a single crosspoint from the STABPGM console output to the DELAY1 destination.
To set the buttons up to fire the salvos, you’ll need to use Navigator. Let’s go to the LIO Info page for the console blade for the surface where the buttons live. At the bottom of this page, you will see “Surface 1 Spares.” Click the + sign to expand this section and you will see the spare buttons (or soft keys) for the surface. Find the one you want to use and go to the “Fire Salvo’ Column. Double-click and you can enable the firing of a salvo via this button. Select the salvo you created for use by this button and click OK.
Now, you will see that this button has been set up to fire the AToAir salvo:
Do the same for the second button, using the BToAir salvo.
Now you are all set to switch Studio B to the airchain that starts with the DELAY1 unit with the press of a single button, and to switch Studio A back to air with the press of a different button.
But we’re not done yet. Spare buttons on Wheatstone consoles have built-in LEDs and these can be turned on via several different methods. The available methods vary slightly from surface to surface, but all have the option LIO LED or Momentary/LIO LED. This means that rather than the surface itself turning the LED on (when the button is pressed), the drive for the LED will come from an LIO signal. This is what we’ll create now. And to make it work the way we want, we’ll add the LIO connections to the new salvos we’ve just built.
First, you need to open the surface GUI for your surface and find the Spare Button page. It might be labeled Spare Buttons or just Buttons. Here’s what it looks like for the LXE console:
You can see on this LXE we have four Spare Buttons set up (the LXE can have quite a few more than this). The first two are set up the way we need our buttons to be configured. The other two are set up for a different type of operation.
Once you have set your buttons to LIO LED, be sure to apply the change to your surface and now you can close the GUI program. We’re going back to Navigator.
Your Spare Buttons will show up as part of the console blade for your surface, and they’ll be listed as Sources. They might be named Spare01, Spare02, or something similar. On my LXE they are called “LXESPR01, LXESPR02” etc. Find the first button in the Source signal list and click on it to examine the built-in LIOs associated with it:
You can see there are two LIOs associated with a Spare Button by default. One is an input, and it uses the function ”Switch 1.” The other is an output and it uses the function “Switch LED 1.” These LIOs are generated by the surface and can’t be changed. All buttons use the Switch 1 and Switch LED 1 functions, regardless of the button number.
In order to turn the LED on, we need to add an LIO (or in this case, an SLIO) to be connected to the Spare Button source that will “mate up” with the existing Switch LED 1 LIO. So we will add an LIO-Only destination with the function “Switch LED 1” and the direction of input. elect an available SLIO to associate with the signal. Let’s call this LEDDrv because it’s what will drive our LED to the ON state. When the input is connected to the output, and the functions match (Switch LED 1) then the LED will come on.
But how will we make the connection? Well, we already have two salvos so let’s just put the crosspoints for the logic in the existing salvos.
We’ll put the crosspoint LXESPR01 → LEDDrv in the AToAir salvo, and the LXESPR02 → LEDDrv connection in the BToAir salvo. So when we fire the first salvo with Spare Button 1, it will put Studio A on the air and turn on the light for Button 1. When we press Spare Button 2, it will put Studio B on the air and make the connection for Button 2’s LED to the LEDDrv LIO (thus disconnecting the crosspoint to the Button 1 LED). Now Button 2’s LED comes on.
There is one other thing you need to be aware of though. On most of our consoles, in order to use the LEDDrv signal to turn on a surface’s LED, this signal needs to be INVERTED. This makes the LEDDrv signal active all the time so that as soon as something is connected to it, the logic output is active.
This isn’t true with some surfaces, such as the DMX. For the DMX, you don’t need to invert the LIO that you are using to drive the LED because the inversion is already built into the source signal.
That’s it. You’re done! Test it out.
A Further Note about Salvos: You can add other things to your salvos of course. This is just an example for a situation we in Tech Support get asked about often. Sometimes a salvo needs to make several connections, and in some cases it needs to disconnect one or more crosspoints as well. You can add a disconnect command to a salvo by right-clicking on the destination in the salvo grid and selecting “Disconnect Destination.”
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