IMPORTANT: This is for a Legacy Product. Please be sure you have a Legacy Product before reading this item.
In this section of the user manual, we will describe how to configure each option in the system. All of these options are on the Setup Tab of the application.
The end result of this process is a Configuration file that you will open and use each time the group meets.
Configuration Files
When you enter a group roster and associate members with devices, you are creating an RTS Pro Configuration file that you re-use each time that group meets. And on any given computer where you have RTS Pro installed, you may create and use any number of configurations – one for each group.
To save a Configuration file, click the red Save button. If this is a new file you’ve just created, use the File Save dialog to enter a name for your configuration and save it. This name will be reflected in the Configuration File name field.
To load an existing Configuration file, click the green Load button and use the File Open dialog to select the configuration file you previously created and saved.
Roster Setup
The Roster Tab contains all the settings related to the membership of the group and which & what type of device should be associated with them:
The Roster Table has a row for each member of the group, which is controlled by the Number of Devices setting. A group can utilize (a.k.a., a chairperson can control) up to 72 devices. Use the up/down controls on the Number of Devices setting until it matches the number of devices your groups will be using. Keep in mind that a group might include non-voting members who need to participate in the request to speak process, such as an attorney, an administrator, or a deputy.
Each row in the table contains information about a single device:
The Display Name field holds the name of the member that is shown on the chair’s display. (It is also the name of the PNG file that you wish to associate with this device. More on this later.)
The Type field indicates what type of device to associate with a Display Name. Four types of devices may be controlled by the chair:
- The Voter device type should be associated with voting members of the group. These are the people who will be using devices to request to speak. When they are recognized by the chair, their RTS icon will blink to draw the chair’s attention.
- Staff members normally do not participate in the request to speak activity. Their microphones may be active throughout a meeting or may only used infrequently. In either case, when activated, Staff members’ RTS icons do not blink.
- The Location device type should be associated with places in the room where people occasionally stand and present, such as a lectern. Locations’ RTS icons also do not blink when the devices in those locations are activated.
- The View device type is associated with cameras. While any number (or all) of Voter, Staff, and Location devices may be active at once, only one View device may be active at any given time.
The Default field indicates whether or not a device should be active at the outset of a session. For example, if you want the chair’s microphone to be on at the beginning of a session, then you would choose a default value of “On” for this device. If/when the chair presses the Mute All Speakers button during a meeting, all devices will be returned to their default state – off or on.
The Chair? selector is a radio button that – if selected – indicates that the member is the chairperson of the group. In RTS Pro, the person who is designated as the chairperson is not able to request to speak (because they can speak any time they want), and their device icon behaves like a staff member’s icon – it does not blink when activated.
The Keypad field is only used when you are operating RTS Pro in conjunction with RollCall Pro, and RollCall Pro is “passing” to RTS Pro any requests to speak it is receiving from a group’s devices. It is an index field, and its value should match the value you have entered in the corresponding roster field in RollCall Pro. The Keypad field is numeric and may contain any number from 1-72.
Controlling Devices
There is one more option on the Roster Tab, a button labeled Device Settings, and it has to do with controlling devices such as microphones and video cameras:
Clicking on this button, displays the Device Setup dialog:
The default setting for Connection Type: is “None”.
With a setting of None, the chair will see requests to speak coming from the group’s members. The chair will also be able to recognize them on the RTS Pro touchscreen display, and those actions will be reflected on the RollCall Pro Public Display and on members’ devices. However, in order for the chair’s touchscreen actions to translate to device on/off control, change this setting to either Wireless RF or Serial ASCII:
The Com Port: field will echo the port on which the computer will send ASCII characters.
Send Attempts controls how many multiples of 5 the wireless RF signals should be sent to a particular device when it is activated. At times, it will be necessary to increase the Send Attempts setting to a higher number (with 5 as the top value), but you should start with the system set to 1.
Various other Com Settings (Baud Rate, Parity, Stop Bits, Data Bits, and Handshake) can also be manipulated. The Restore Defaults button will set all Com Settings options to their default values.
Once you have established your desired settings, click the Connect button. Clicking the OK button will close the Device Setup dialog, leaving all your settings intact.
When you are finished entering your group’s roster information and customizing device settings, click the red Save button at the top of the Setup Tab to save your settings.
If you would like for your chairperson to be able to control devices in addition to controlling discussion, please contact RollCall Systems for more information.
Support for the Biamp TesiraForte DSP
In addition to being able to integrate with digital signal processors through the parsing of our Serial ASCII output, RTS Pro is now capable of transmitting standard commands to a TesiraForte DSP in Tesira Text Protocol (TTP) format. To enable TTP output, select Serial ASCII has the Connection Type and check the box next to TTP Format:
Adjust your other Connection Settings as appropriate, then click the Connect button to begin transmitting ASCII commands in TTP format to your DSP over a serial port.
Added User-Customizable ASCII Initialization Files
If you need to make an adjustment to the standard ASCII serial port output from RTS Pro, you can edit the SerialASCII.ini file located in the RTS Pro install directory:
This file contains a row for each command that RTS Pro is capable of generating. In the above example, the standard text output for turning all devices off is A=0. If you would like to change that text command, simply edit the text that follows the first equals sign in that row.
Note: There is a separate ini file for TTP control that is also customizable.
Debugging Controls for DSP Integration
To help developers debug their Serial ASCII integration methods, 3 new controls have been added to the Device Settings dialog:
These are for use only with guidance from OpenMeeting technicians. End users should not modify these settings on their own, so they should remain unchecked.
Device Layout
The Layout Tab is used to arrange the devices in the room from the perspective of the chairperson so that, for example, the chair sees requests to speak from members on the left-hand side of the room displayed on the left-hand side of the screen.
When you click the Layout Tab for a new configuration, the devices are arranged in rows like this:
Note: If you have more than 1 device but you see only 1, then you may need to use the Reset Icon Position option on the Edit menu to reset the icons into rows before rearranging them:
You might also opt to use the Reset Icon Position option if you decide for some reason that you want to start over.
Rearranging icons is accomplished by simply clicking on and dragging icons to their new locations.
You may find – depending on the overall number of icons and your display area – that your icons need to be resized, up or down. Use the Scale Icons option on the Edit menu to increase or decrease your icons’ overall size:
Arranging icons is an iterative process because the number of total devices will affect how much scaling is possible or necessary.
When finished arranging your icons, your layout might look something like this:
All of the voters’ icons – except for the chairperson – have 3 checkboxes above them. These Times Recognized checkboxes indicate how many times a member has been recognized during the discussion of an agenda item. They are part of a voter’s icon component, so you must take them into account as you re-position icons.
On the Layout Tab, voters’ icons also display a default request to speak (RTS) indicator of “3”. When you’re using the system from the Meeting Tab, you will see actual RTS indicators of 1, 2, 3, etc.
Customizing Appearance
Icon images and the background behind them may be customized very easily.
To customize an icon’s image, all you need to do is place a PNG or JPG image with the same name as the device name in the program’s Icons folder. The image name is not case sensitive. For example, if you have populated your Icons folder like this:
Then your layout will look like this:
In a similar way, the background image – the gray area behind the device icons – may be customized. Simply choose a background PNG or JPG image and save it with the name Background and place it in your program’s install folder:
For example, if you chose a wood grain image as your background, your layout might look like this:
