Friendswood ISD Boardroom (TEKVOX)

Tasks set by the client in the project:
The customer’s requirement included a Dias microphone system and three video projectors. They also required that the room to be multi-use for board meetings as well as three separate meeting areas. For control, they wanted two wall mount touchscreen controllers, a tablet touchscreen and three simple touchpads to control each projector for the individual areas.

Project description:
To achieve this we designed a system using the TEKVOX control products using iRidium mobile software along with our new DSP Microphone system and a TekFlex-16 video matrix.

The system is designed to be a decentralized control system allowing each touchscreen controller to independently operate the system. Unlike other systems using a central control system where all devices are controlled by a single controller, anyone of the touchscreen controllers can operate the system by themselves. This allows the touchscreen controller to have the same program and if any of the touchscreen controllers fail there are still two others that can operate the room. For simple operation of the system, a small touchscreen called a TekTouchPad is mounted at each projector.

For this system the wall mounted touchscreen controllers used are the TEKVOX TekController TCX9 running the iRidium mobile software. These are 9” touchscreens with a PoE LAN connection. The screen is built into a wedge and when mounted on a wall it gives improved viewing over flat mounted screens. The TCX9 also supports VNC operation for remote viewing and controlling.

With the iRidium mobile software we are able to do complex control system programming using JavaScript. This allows us to provide an advanced control system without having to add a centralized controller. Unlike other control system software, iRidium is more integrated with the GUI design allowing button names to be used directly in the program. With other control systems the GUI is created separately from the program where each button has an address. This old method of programming can cause a lot of extra time spent making certain that numbers are not duplicated and they are matched in the program. Another great feature of using an advanced programming language like JavaScript, is there is so much online help to find solutions and test code.

Driver development became a lot easier with JavaScript by using objects to create re-useable code. With other control systems, drivers can sometime become very messy due to the structure of the driver module. Getting data in and out of modules from the main program can take a lot of extra work and program overhead. Using JavaScript objects all you have to do is send data to a class in the object. Callbacks are then created to get data back to the main program.

Control panels:

• TEK TCX9 – 2 pcs
• TekTouchPad – 3 pcs

Equipment:
DSP Microphone system
Biamp TesiraForte
BenQ MH741 projector – 3pcs
TEKVOX CB1-A Ceiling Box - 3 pcs
TEKVOX TekController TCX9
TEK 3 device controllers
TEKVOX CB-1A

More detailed description of the project

Photos

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Screenshots

• 
• 
• 
•