Traditional Wiring & Signal Names

In this tutorial we are going to cover all the different ways you can wire components together

in the software. Q-SYS offer a variety of ways you can do this,

and knowing how each one of them works will really keep your design clean and efficient.

So let’s start off by adding an I/O Frame, go to your Inventory and hit the plus icon, peripherals, I/O Frame.

And let’s add some cards to it so we’ll go over to its properties panel,

let’s say it’s got a Mic/Line Card and a DataPort Card.

Alright, we’re going to drag the components for both of those Cards into our Schematic.

Now let’s take a look at these two components.

Now normally there would be a whole lot of digital processing that goes on in between these two.

Audio comes into our system through the Mic/Line In, it goes through DSP,

and then it goes out into our system to a loudspeaker or an amplifier through the DataPort.

But for the sake of this tutorial, we’re just going to connect them directly.

The Mic/Line Component has four output pins, and the DataPort Card has four input pins.

Now you’ll notice that its output pins over here are a different shape,

they’re a little right-facing triangle rather than a circle,

that’s because these outputs aren’t an audio line, this is a data line

and Q-SYS won’t let you wire two components together that don’t match.

So the first way that we could wire these outputs to these inputs is by Traditional Wiring.

Where you simply grab a pin, drag it over to the next pin, and voila,

you’ve got a nice curved line that connects them. You can do this one at a time

or you can do multiple at a time – you could grab all of these output pins

and drag them all over to the input pins

and they will automatically wire themselves to the appropriate inputs.

Now if you don’t like this curved wire look, you can click anywhere on the wire and create a break point.

You can drag it somewhere else and adjust the line however you want.

You can make as many breakpoints as you want, you can even click on a break point

and then delete that break point if you didn’t like it,

and you just keep on adjusting it until you’ve got the wire that you like.

But that looks a little crazy so let’s just make that a nice curve.

Now sometimes if you have a big complicated design

you may not want to see wires running all over the place.

So you can use a second way of wiring components together that’s called Signal Names.

So I’m going to delete these wires. What you want to do for Signal Names is you can click on any pin,

hit the space bar, and type in the name that you’d like for your signal name.

I’m going to use “Mic Channel 1" and hit enter. Then you can go to the pin you’re going to connect it to,

once again you hit the space bar and you type it in.

Now you’ll notice that before I’ve even finished typing it in,

it’s going to present to me all the available Signal Names that I can choose from.

Now you may have also noticed that, until the connection is complete,

the signal name label has a jagged end to it, indicating that it is unterminated.

Not only that, down here by our Design Inspector we have a warning icon

telling us that we have incomplete signal paths. Now once we finish that Signal Name,

then you’ll notice that they curve off and our design inspector is happy again.

Now just like traditional wiring, you can create multiple Signal Names at a time,

so let’s delete these ones. And we’re going to select all four of our input pins and hit the space bar,

and type in a label. And when we hit enter it will automatically assign them numbers in increasing value.

Now one thing you may have noticed there is I selected those pins by moving from

left to right with my selection box, if I was moving from right to left then my component is also

being touched by that green box so if I were to hit the space bar now and rename it,

whoops – I’m renaming the entire component.

So you don’t want to do that. So let’s undo that.

So now to copy over these Signal Names you want to select them all, hit Control+C to copy them,

you’re going to select the pins you want to connect them to,

and hit Control+V and now we’ve got nice terminated Signal Names.

Alright, why don’t we put a pause right here, and you can go on to the next part whenever you’re ready.