Intro: Back in 2010 we had a customer (a systems integrator) who had an NHS client who wanted to upgrade 10 near identical MDT rooms with a control system. Each having slight differences based on what equipment was already installed for example some had projectors others had LCD displays, whilst having 1, 2 or 3 projectors/displays but all with the same core source switching functionality.
The challenge: was the client wanted touch screen control but couldn’t afford the programming costs for 10 individual systems.
The solution: we proposed was to use an Aurora Multimedia NXT-700 touch screen control system. The two great things about this touch screen is they come with a built in control system for less than the price of most touch screen only from the likes of AMX and Crestron and secondly they are web based panels that allow page layouts to be created in any number of standard web tools Flash, HTML, Java Script. To save programming 10 different systems, we programmed the NXT-700 event database with all of the equipment for all 10 rooms, we then created a Flash program with all the buttons to control all the functions of all the equipment. The trick was every element (buttons, faders etc.) in the Flash program were referenced to XML, so all the integrator needed to do to customise each system was to edit the XML data in their favorite text editor.