Transcript
Troubleshooting Control Programming
9m 52s
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[Music]
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Q-Sys Designer software contains several components that can be added to your design
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and then configured to provide control functionality.
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For programmers that are relatively new to the platform or for more complicated programming
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involving a large number of control components,
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there are some troubleshooting tools available in Q-Sys
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as well as a few important control concepts a programmer needs to understand.
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Let’s start with a simple example.
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In this schematic we have a Custom Controls component
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configured to provide two Trigger buttons
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to drive the Decrease and Increase input control pins on a Value Stepper component.
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If we press the Trigger 1 and Trigger 2 buttons,
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you would expect the Value Stepper to decrease or increase its value.
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As you can see, this does not appear to function correctly.
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There is a very helpful tool available in Designer to help diagnose these types of issues.
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If we go to the Tools menu and select View Component Control Info,
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we will now see a popup window which I am going to dock at the top left of Designer.
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This window will provide a list of the available controls and more importantly their control types
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for any component we select in the schematic.
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These control types typically consist of Boolean, Float, Integer, String, or Trigger
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and let us know what type of control value
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the component will expect to receive on a control input pin
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as well as what type of control value the component will provide on an output pin.
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While the control components in Designer are quite forgiving when mixing and matches
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various control types
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from one component to another,
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you can sometimes run into issues when a control component is receiving a mismatched control type.
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If I select the Value Stepper component
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we see that the Decrease and Increase controls are Booleans,
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but we are feeding these input pins with Triggers.
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This mismatch in control type is the source of our issue here.
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If we look at this corrected example where we changed the
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Custom Controls button type to Momentary
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which will produce a Boolean control type value,
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we see that the Value Stepper then functions correctly.
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In the next example, we have a Text Controller scripting
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component that provides a Toggle button control
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that we would like to use with the SurgeX Axess plugin to control the electrical power
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of our AV system.
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If we press the Power Toggle button multiple times,
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we notice that the Power Outlet state does not follow the state of the Toggle button
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and we have to press the button twice for power on and twice again for power off.
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To troubleshoot this issue, we can check the control type
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of the SurgeX plugin in the Component Controls window
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to find that the Power Outlet control is a Trigger.
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This Trigger input will work with a low to high transition
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from our Power Toggle button’s Boolean value,
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but not from a high to low transition which is why we have to press our Toggle button twice.
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To correct this issue, we can use a Control
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Function component configured as a Logic 1-of-N function.
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We will need to route both the output of our Power Toggle
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and the SurgeX Outlet State output into the inputs of our Control Function.
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Now, the SurgeX plugin will receive a low to high
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transition to activate the Trigger when the Power Toggle goes high,
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and then receive another low to high transition when the Power Toggle goes low
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to turn off the power.
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Moving onto another troubleshooting example.
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In this design, we are attempting to perform a Value Sum of some Integer
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Knobs and the Value output from a Selector component.
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If I change the Integer Knob values you can see that the Value Sum is adding these values,
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but the Selector’s Value output is not included in the overall sum.
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To troubleshoot this issue, we can use a couple of tools.
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We can use our Component Controls window in Designer to determine the Selector
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Value’s control typewhich is a String.
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We can also use another tool such as the Control Signal Monitor script
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to monitor and track control value changes in our design.
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This helpful script and many others are available from the QSC Communities website.
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If you are unfamiliar with the QSC Communities website,
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this site is a location for QSC programmers
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to ask questions and receive answers for Q-Sys related topics
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as well as download example designs and control programming such as this
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Control Signal Monitor script we will be using to help troubleshoot this issue.
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If we take a closer look at the Selector’s Value, we see that the String value is changing,
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but the actual integer Value remains zero.
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For us to correct this issue we will need to find a component that can interpret this String
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and provides an Integer control value.
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To do this, we can add a Custom Control configured as an Integer Knob.
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changes are now being converted by the Custom Controls Integer Knob
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and the Value Sum is now providing us with an accurate sum of the control values.
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To assist with troubleshooting plugins and scripts,
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the left pane of Designer includes a section called Inspector that provides information
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to help locate and identify scripting and plugin issues.
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In this example, I am currently connected to a core,
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and if we navigate to the Inspector pane in Designer,
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we see the Scripts and Plugins sections that include a list of the scripting components
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as well as all of the plugins included in our design.
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Paging through this list, we can quickly scan all of the scripts and plugins in the design
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to identify which ones may be causing an issue.
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This design includes a Script named Inspector Demo
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that I have added to help illustrate some of the diagnostic information provided by the Inspector.
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If we open up this demo script’s section in Inspector
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we can monitor various aspects of this script while it is running.
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Starting at the top we see a Load percentage my script is consuming.
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This Load percentage is based on the processing time required for my script to run versus
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the total processing time Designer allocates for a script or a plugin to finish processing.
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If I then set my demo script to perform some very processor intensive tasks,
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you will see that the amount of processing time consumed by this one script will increase.
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This increase in processing time is also reflected by the Control
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and Lua Compute Usage in the core’s Status component.
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If you have a large number of scripts or plugins or just a single processing intensive one,
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this processing time percentage can help identify where your design may have an issue.
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Next, we have the Memory consumption that displays how much RAM my script is consuming.
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This can be helpful identifying issues such as memory leaks where
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an ever increasing amounts of RAM is being consumed.
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With my demo script, I created a trigger to start a memory leak
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by storing more and more data to RAM as shown in Inspector.
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This increasing RAM consumption is also shown in the Memory Usage meter
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in the core’s Status component.
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If this were left running, this would eventually cause serious stability issues for my design
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as the core will eventually run out of RAM.
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If we look in Inspector below the memory usage,
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we have Errors which will display if there
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have been any processing errors while running a script or plugin.
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If I use my demo script to execute some poorly written code that causes an error,
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not only will we see this listed below Memory,
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but we will also see a red indicator beside the name of our script
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to help us locate if a script or plugin is having an issue.
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In addition, the Inspector displays the Verification status of scripts and plugins.
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As an example, a plugin such as the SurgeX plugins in this design has been verified by Designer
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and can be trusted to be an unaltered official version of the plugin.
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If a programmer was to download a plugin from Asset Manager,
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and then crack open and make any modifications,
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this verification process would fail and the status
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in Inspector would show as “Verification Failed”.
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If we look at my demo script’s status,
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this shows as 'Unverified' which indicates the script
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has not gone through the verification process
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which is perfectly normal for user generated scripts.
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As you can see, Inspector can be very helpful when locating and diagnosing issues,
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but this can also be helpful when writing your own scripts and plugins to check for memory leaks
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or excessive processor consumption to avoid these issues while your code is still in development.
Downloads and Links
Troubleshooting Control Programming
9m 52s