Introduction to Control

While most of what you’ve seen so far in Q-SYS Level One training

has dealt with adding audio hardware and routing audio components,

don’t forget that Q-SYS is a full featured control engine as well.

That means that is has all the power and features necessary

to accomplish both small tasks like manipulating the behavior of native components within Q-SYS,

as well as large tasks like facilitating complicated two-way communications with third-party devices.

There are innumerable other devices in the world that can accept external control

from basic LEDs and contact closures to projectors, shade relays, lighting controllers, cinema masking,

media players … really the sky’s the limit.

Essentially, if it’s controllable, then Q-SYS can control it, all without a separate control processor.

Some devices may have non-native control plug-ins that has been designed

for integration into the Q-SYS Ecosytem while others might be controlled through GPIO, serial ports,

network communications, or more complicated Lua coding.

However, we’re not going to get into most of that in this Q-SYS Level One course.

If you’re interested in exploring the wide world of third party control,

we invite you to check out all of our Control-specific courses after you complete Level One training.

Instead, we’re going to focus on the simpler end of control: the actions that almost every design requires.

We’ll look at the different ways to control the native Q-SYS components in the schematic beyond their basic functionality,

as well as how to put control of your design into the hands of the end user.

We’ll start with Snapshots,

which are used to record the state of one or more controls so you can recall the state with a single action,

rather than readjusting every control manually.

Then we’ll take a look at how to customize the appearance and behavior of each individual control,

beyond its default properties in the control panel.

Then we’ll explore Control Pins, which allow you to connect controls together

so that changing one control can have an effect on one or more other controls.

Finally, we’ll take a nice long dive into creating the User Control Interface, or UCI,

which is the interactive visual control that your end users will actually use to interact with the system,

whether that be from a native Q-SYS control panel installed in the venue,

or deployed remotely via a phone, PC, or tablet.

Again, if you want to dig deeper into controlling third party devices or if you want to explore features

like the Block Controller or Q-SYS Scripting engine to write your own custom scripting to accomplish tasks

beyond the basic controls that you’ll learn in this section, be sure to check out our advanced control courses.

For now, take a quick break, and come back to start your Q-SYS Control Overview.