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The Q-SYS User Control Interface, or UCI for short, provides the means for an end user to control parts
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of the Q-SYS design via a networked device such as a Q-SYS Touchscreen,
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a Windows-based PC, or an IOS device...
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The choice is yours as to how much
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or how little you would like the user of a UCI to be able to control the system,
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and the creativity you use in designing the UCI can go a long way to enhance the user’s total experience.
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Don’t worry, there’s no programming experience required to make a UCI!
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You can build robust UCI screens by simply dragging any Q-SYS DSP
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or control element from the schematic into the UCI Editor.
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Luck for you, you don’t need to learn a new platform in order to build these UCIs
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and you don’t need separate control hardware to run the UCIs.
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All that’s required is to add a UCI deployment feature license to your core processor.
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Which will allow you to deploy your UCIs to any device.
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In this video we’ll go through the basic steps of creating and editing the basic properties of a UCI.
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Your first step is to open the UCI Editor, by navigating to the Left-Side Pane.
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The first thing you’ll notice is that there is already a UCI here titled Inventory Status,
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which displays the current status of every Inventory item in your design.
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These are categorized by the Location you provide in their Properties.
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You cannot remove, rename, or edit this UCI.
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This screen is what we call the UCI Editor.
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The UCI interface itself has replaced our main Schematic page,
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and you can see a new side panel which lists all of the pages, layers, and objects on this UCI.
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We’ll talk more about those in a minute.
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First, we’ll create a new UCI, by pressing the plus icon in the UCI panel.
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You now have a blank UCI with one blank Page in it.
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We can add almost any control from our design into this blank UCI space,
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as well as a variety of external images.
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To add a control, simply open the component’s control panel, select the controls you want,
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and copy and paste them into your UCI window.
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I used the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V shortcut,
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but you could also use the right-click menu to select Copy and Paste.
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Alternatively, you could drag these controls up to the UCI’s name tab, and then drop them onto your UCI.
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Or … and this is what I usually do
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you could undock your UCI window by dragging its tab away from the main screen.
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You could either move this to a second computer monitor,
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or you could split your screen by releasing the mouse button on one of these four split-screen icons
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Splitting your screen makes it extremely easy to drag controls from your Schematic onto your UCI.
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But before you add too much to your UCI, you should make sure your panel is sized for right device.
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If you select your UCI’s name and look at its Properties,
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choose the Panel Type from the available options.
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Once you change your selection,
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the dimensions of the UCI Editor will automatically adjust to the new device.
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This will change the canvas size, but it doesn’t rescale any of the objects.
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So, be sure to do this first, or you may end up needing to reorganize all your UCI elements
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for the correct dimension if you first built it with an incorrect device selected.
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There are a variety of QSC Touchscreen controllers on this list, as well as iPhones, iPads,
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and generic aspect ratio options for displaying on a networked PC.
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For some of these devices, be sure to specify if you want to work in a horizontal Landscape mode,
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or a vertical Portrait mode.
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For most UCIs, you won’t be able to fit every control onto a single screen, even if you wanted to.
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Instead, let’s add a new page to your UCI,
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by pressing the Plus button down here at the bottom and selecting “Add Page.”
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Now we have a fresh UCI page, and we can add more content to this page.
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But now that your UCI has multiple pages,
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you’ll need to decide how you want the user to navigate between them.
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By default, navigation tabs are added to the side.
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You can customize some basic properties of these pages here on the right.
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You can change your Title to rename them.
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You could select an Icon that will appear on the Page tab.
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And you can select a Fill color which will be used for both the Page’s background and the tab color.
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You can also adjust the depth of this tab window by dragging its border with your mouse.
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To further customize these tabs, let’s select the UCI itself and adjust its Properties.
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You could change their Location to dock this navigation bar to the Left, Right, Bottom or Top.
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You can also change the font, and add a colorful Stroke (or border) with these fields here.
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However, if you don’t like any of these options there are other ways to let your
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user navigate between pages as well.
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The user can actually navigate between pages by swiping left or right on the screen,
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rather than using the navigation buttons.
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In this case, you might want to change the Tabs location to “None,” since we’re not using them.
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On the other hand,
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you could disable the swipe ability by finding the “Swipe Disabled” property and activating it.
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Now we have a UCI without navigation tabs or swipe ability – but this might be exactly what you want.
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You see, an important thing to note about using the Page Tabs or the Swipe method is that these
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give the user access to every single page in your UCI.
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But let’s say you have a Maintenance page that you don’t want a casual user to stumble upon,
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or perhaps you have a large number of pages and you want to really customize the paths between them.
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In this case, you can use Navigation buttons.
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You’ll find these in the “Layout” branch on the Schematic Library, in the “UCI” folder.
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The Navigation Button can be placed anywhere on your UCI,
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and you can change its appearance just like any other button.
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Its main property you need to adjust is which Page you want it to open when it is pressed.
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This allows you to create your own custom navigation section,
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and limit the user’s navigation based on the options you present them.
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It’s also worth noting that you can write any label you want on these Navigation buttons,
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while the Navigation tabs will only display the Page’s actual name.
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There are a few more properties here we should mention, such as the Enable Button Swipe property.
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This property allows you to activate multiple buttons without your finger leaving the touchscreen.
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Imagine a paging interface where you can select multiple zones for your announcement.
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If Button Swipe is disabled, then you would need to select each of those zones one by one.
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But, if Button Swipe is enabled,
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you can make one continuous swipe and every button you touch along the way will engage.
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Let’s also look at the Private property.
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When we talk about deploying these UCIs in a later video,
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you’ll learn that a Windows device or an iOS device can manually select from all available UCIs present on the network.
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If you want to exclude a particular UCI from that list, engage Private here.
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That means the UCI can only be displayed by a QSC touchscreen that it is assigned to.
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This is not the same as restricting access to a specific user.
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If you want to require a user to log on to a UCI, that is accomplished in the Administrator tool.
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Navigate to the User Control Interfaces tab, and select the UCI you want to protect.
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Engage the “Require User Logon” button and the UCI will display a keypad screen instead of the UCI.
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A user must input their custom PIN number, as configured in the Users list, in order to access the UCI.
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To log off, you should provide them with a Log Off button, found in the Layout>UCI Folder.
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And a few more things, since we’re already looking at them.
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The Clean Screen button will disable your UCI for thirty seconds, allowing you to physically clean your screen.
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And the URL button allows you to specify a web address.
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Pressing this button will launch the viewers default native web browser and load your hyperlink.
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This is obviously only available on an internet-connected tablet or PC, not on a QSC touchscreen.
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So, that’s the basic structural layout of how to add UCIs and adjust their properties and navigation.
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Go ahead and take a quick break if you’d like.
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In the next videos we’ll look at how further you can customize their appearances and actually deploy them onto a touchscreen.
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See you next time.
