Control Pins

Welcome back. Now that you’re familiar with how controls work and different styles of controls,

let's see how we can use controls to control other controls.

If you select any component and go to its Properties panel in the Right-Side Pane,

you’ll notice the bottom section has an expandable window called Control Pins.

Every control in the component’s control panel is listed here,

and if you check a control’s box then it exposes a new Control Pin on the bottom of the component.

These square Control pins can be wired to each other the same way that circular audio pins

can be wired to each other, but control pins send data to each other rather than audio.

The flow follows the same logic as audio, in that incoming data comes from the left,

and outgoing data goes out to the right.

Let’s say I have a situation where I want to press the Play Button of an Audio Player

and also stop a different Audio Player.

I can expose the Play Trigger of the first player and the Stop Trigger of the second one.

I'll wire the right hand, out going pin of the first audio player,

in to the left hand incoming pin of the second audio player

Now when I press Play here, it will start the Audio Player

while simultaneously sending a trigger impulse across this wire to Stop the second Audio Player.

You can accomplish an infinite number of simple tasks with a single wire like this,

but before you start playing … be aware that not all controls are necessarily going to play well together.

If you use one trigger button to control another trigger button like this,

you know exactly what’s going to happen.

But think about what you’d like to accomplish before you start mixing control types.

What happens, for instance, if you wire the mute button of the

first Audio Player to the Gain knob of the second?

If you answered that the Gain knob with toggle between 0 and 100%, you’re wrong. Wrong.

You see, the mute button expresses itself in a few different ways: textually and numerically.

It has two possible states – on and off.

Textually, these are represented by the string of "muted" and "unmuted,"

but numerically these are represented by the binary values of 1 and 0.

Meanwhile, the Gain Knob has a numeric range of -100 to 20,

so it’s going to accept a numerical value as an input. That means that when you toggle this mute button,

you’ll end up toggling the Gain knob between the values of 0dB and 1dB,

which definitely is not muting and unmuting the control.

It all comes down to understanding how each control expresses itself.

The "File Name" control, for instance, is the Text field where you select the audio file you want to play.

This control wants to be fed a text string.

If you wired the Mute button to the File Name, it’s going to look for audio files

on your Core named "Muted" or "Unmuted," which probably aren’t going to exist.

The key to successfully wiring control pins together is to just think logically,

and make sure you’re connecting controls that make sense together.

If you’re in Emulation Mode or on the Core, you can hover your mouse over any control pin to read its current state,

which should give you a good idea of the type of data it would pass along.

It’s definitely possible to make far more complicated interactions between these control pins,

and there are a lot of components in the Control Components branch

of the Schematic Library that let you do this. We’re not going to go into them in this Level One Course,

but it’s important that you know that they exist, so you have an idea of what’s possible later on.

There are simple things like delays and routers, you could use a Flip-Flop

to convert a trigger button into a toggle button, and you can even apply custom logic functions

or even scripting to make your controls do exactly what you want.

If you want to learn more about these components now, just select one and press F1 to bring up

up the Help file about it. Again, these are advanced concepts that you don’t need to know right now.

The only thing I do want to show you is the Custom Controls component.

This component allows you to generate blank controls that have no prior association.

Its control panel is entirely empty until you choose what types of controls you want it to have.

In its Properties panel you can choose a Control Type, and you’ll see a list of different styles.

There are a variety of knobs with different numeric ranges, an LED, a fader, here’s the Toggle Button

and the Trigger button … everything we talked about earlier.

Make a selection and that button appears in the control panel, and its control pin is ready to be wired.

Perhaps you want one trigger button that will start two Audio Players at the same time.

Simply wire your new button to the Play triggers of those two Audio Players.

We’re not going to go any deeper than that in Level One,

but you can probably start imagining some of the things you can accomplish with control pins.

Even without a Core, you can have a lot of fun experimenting with this in Emulation Mode, so have fun!