Touchscreen customization

[UniCav]

I want to eliminate my extra cabling and midi controller and switch to a touchscreen PC or tablet so the only USB cable will be to my DMX adapter. I've been playing around with my Windows 8 laptop and seem to have S2L working which I'm hopeful will eliminate the need to manually set the speed during each song we play, but I notice I can only choose Touchscreen 1 which is the default layout. What I need is only the CueList and speed control/tap sync. Is is possible to get Touchscreen 2 and customize it for just cuelist and speed control the main device or does that absolutely require a 2nd screen?

[Spirit]

hi
yes you need to choose between TUI1 or TUI2. you cant get both at the same time.
so, no you dont need a second screen.

/spirit

[UniCav]

I was looking at the Monitor # not the touchscreen interface checkbox. This is definitely the direction I want to go in. After playing around with adding/removing controls, and looking at the WIKI on Touchscreen 2 I have ha couple questions:
Can you move the buttons around after adding them? The selection of the buttons is in the way of a good chunk of the screen so you can't add buttons to that area, and it seems to be a serious pain getting them lined up.
How do you get the fixtures themselves on the page? I was able to find the Select Odd/even/all etc but not the individual fixtures.
Thanks again for the help, this is going to greatly simplify my setup and operation

[Spirit]

hi.

Can you move the buttons around after adding them?

YES! , press the rightmouse button and you can select "move buttons" on a unused pease of screen.

The selection of the buttons is in the way of a good chunk of the screen so you can't add buttons to that area, and it seems to be a serious pain getting them lined up.

first add the button and then line them up.
and yes its a Pain in the @$$ to get the buttons lined up realy nice.
i allways open the .FTS with a notepad and add the correct X, Y info
and there a tutorial about how all the number are linedup on a .FTS file...

How do you get the fixtures themselves on the page?

Not possible

I was able to find the Select Odd/even/all etc but not the individual fixtures.

if you have 24 or less fixtures you can create differnt groups buttons for each fixture.(workaround, yes not ideal)

and here some images of touchscreen pages i made.
For paintball centrum:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0p6vei95bx04x ... ll%201.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gsbbq32v27828 ... ll%202.png

a test page with 180 Overridebuttons
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7lt89pc8o42bbbn/Test1.png

and touchscreen page i use on my touchscreen laptop:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/351dybtbtabhu ... %20TUI.png

[UniCav]

Awesome info Spirit and tons of help. I didn't think of right clicking on empty space (DUH?) And I am only running 8 fixtures at the moment and the next phase will probably only jump it up to 16-20 so groups is a perfect workaround. Thanks a million! Now I have some work to do and need to pick and order a good tablet!

[Spirit]

whoops i forgot the link for the .FTS tutorial..
http://www.freestylersupport.com/wiki/e ... om_ts_page

[UniCav]

I picked up a Dell Venue 8 Pro. Had to rig up an OTG cable to get it hooked to a powered hub and my DMX adapter but it did work. Ordered a real OTG cable so I can continue customizing it. I'm going to have to do some serious work on the touchscreen, FTS file and background, probably make custom buttons too, to allow for the screen resolution of 1280x800 on an 8" screen. But it looks like it's going to work well.

[UniCav]

Spirit I think they've changed the image names since you did the tutorial. There's 10 custom buttons now instead of 4 and they run from custom11 to custom30 but custom 18/19/20 are missing. I added a custom18 100x100 black box and replaced custom28 with a 100x100 blue box to see if I could get a bigger button with custom8. I get the activated button but the normal unactivated button is still a default black button that looks like Custom7. I tried changing out Custom1 and Custom2 and that causes the activated buttons that are normal Gray to change to a default Custom1.

What I'm trying to do is get a button big enough to see on 1280x800 @ 8", about 4 or maybe 6 buttons wide on the screen for my cue lists and speed slider, and a max of 8 button across the top for my individual lights (groups) and the macro selector. That should be enough for me to use for my custom layout and still be able to hit them easily, but the way they've got the filenames set up at this point is not making any sense.

[Spirit]

hi it doesnt seems to be that hard.

but if i look at it , its seems like he did it like this.

the old list stays the same only.

and these are the new ones.

Custom15 -> Custom25
Custom 16 -> Custom26
Custom17 -> Custom27
Custom17 -> Custom28
Custom17 -> Custom29
Custom17 -> Custom30

only custom 17 and 27~30 is differnt.
but custom 17 = Off state and 27~30 = On state

but mady if you add custom 18, 19 and 20 it will also work..

but be carefull if you change the order of the files , rename then or delete them it will all be massed up

/spirit

[UniCav]

I think you're right, after tinkering a bit more I came up with the same thing.
I backed up the whole Touch folder and renamed it BigTouch, then resized all the ones I wanted to use.
Renamed Touch to ORIGTouch and BigTouch to Touch and started using them.
Got everything working and fine tuned the XY coords in my FTS file and it's a good place to start
Here's the pictures of the current rig and the screen. Haven't figured out how to do a screenshot on the new tablet yet. Now I need a cool background with outlines and the band's logo

Dell Venue 8 Pro / Powered hub / OTG USB Cable / DMXKing
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lh22j9jrilaaw ... MX.Rig.JPG

1280x800 Touchscreen Interface
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h6f185e8y1cfc ... screen.JPG

[UniCav]

So the 1st show with the new setup was overall a success. Some problems I had were:

Tap Sync quirky - At first Tap Sync seemed to be spot on with the touchscreen, but at times it starts to lag again or completely ignore the 2nd tap causing the whole cue to stop

Sound2Light quirky - My first show using S2L. 1st run it didn't activate the microphone and wouldn't work at all. So I went back to tap sync. 2nd time it fired up and started working but AGC/ATC couldn't seem to settle on levels and it would go nuts or stop. Then I tried manually choosing levels but the controls are so small on an 8" screen I couldn't grab them. Had it working pretty well for awhile then it completely stopped changing the speed again so I had to kill it and go back to Tap.

Selection buttons / Macros / Menu and controls too small to touch - an 8" screen at 1280x800 is just barely usable in a controlled environment and almost not at all during a show. The buttons I created for touchscreen at 140x140 are OK but all the standard menus, the macro selection bar and the speed slider are too small. Would be great if there was a way to adjust those.

System would work great for awhile then begin to lag or stop responding. I'm not sure if this is a Freestyler issue or something about the tablet. The Dell Venue 8 Pro is pretty slick overall. 1.6ghz Dual Core processor, 2gb Ram. I've disabled USB power controls in my power plan for the show. It was spot on at times then would start to lag so pushing a cue button would only take effect in a second or two. And once I selected Odd and Even fixtures and chose a color macro, then tried to enable a cue and got no control at all. I wound up having to shutdown Freestyler and restart to get control again.

If anyone has suggestions on any of this please chime in.