Trigger Master

Owned by Georg Hentsch
Last updated: Dec 04, 2019
5 min read

Both the branding and ticker players can be triggered by automation systems and other user interfaces like Ross Video’s Dashboard. Trigger Master serves as an optional hub to the players. Instead of the players reading automation directly, Trigger Master can read the automation pipe (IP or COM) and then push the commands out over another IP pipe. This is essential for COM because only one process can open a COM port making it impossible for both players to deal with automation over that port. Instead, the triggers come to Trigger Master and then echoed over IP so both players can read them.

Trigger Master is essential for IP too because automation systems usually expect to send commands out over a single IP port where the IP port is a server (as opposed to a client). So, automation wants to connect to a single IP port so it can send triggers to both branding and ticker players.

Best to think of Trigger Master as 2 pipes. One for receiving automation triggers (COM or IP) and the other for communicating with one or more players.

In the Main tab of Trigger Master, we display the ip address running Trigger Master and a tab control:

  1. Automation

  2. Players

  3. Regex

  4. Test Trigger

  5. Preferences

Automation

This tabs provides the settings for setting up the automation connection. There is support for Trigger Master serving as either IP server or client. Acting as a server is more common but both scenarios are needed. The field Automation Server is the ip address of the automation server in the case where automation takes the role of server. But the more common case is Trigger Master being the IP server and hence, there’s no need to including an IP address for automation and it is actually hidden.

While automation systems can push triggers (aka commands) out over IP, it’s also possible to send commands over a com port either exclusively or simultaneous to an IP port. The COM groupbox is used to define the COM port used:

Players

This is where you define your port for communicating with players. The port is also opened/closed here.

Regex

Regex means Regular Expressions. It’s a way to modify the automation commands to something more compatible with Chameleon. There are plenty of resources explaining how to work with regular expressions and granted it’s not a trivial pursuit. Basically, we’re defining a pattern and how to replace the automation command’s format. There’s no limit to how many regexes are defined and when Trigger Master gets an automation command, it attempts to convert the string using the regexes in the order in the grid.

For example, here is the regexes for replacing Chyron CII extended commands to typical Chameleon commands with <> prefix/suffix.

Test Trigger

We can send test strings to either the players or back at automation from the Test Trigger tab. When sending a trigger command to players, regex is used so it becomes a good way to test your regex setting.

We can also send messages back at automation. Some automation systems may want notification that a player has received a trigger so this becomes a good way to test that the automation system is receiving messages.

Preferences

Finally, the Preferences tab provides a way to optionally have the player(s) reply back to automation. It goes in the reverse direction of the trigger. This can be used to acknowledge to automation that a trigger has been acted upon.

Use System Tray when set has Trigger Master hide into the system tray when closed as opposed to exiting the application. More on that in the Additional Notes section.

Some automation systems poll their servers to make sure they’re still alive. This is generally called a heartbeat test. This usually follows with the server replying with a string also called a heartbeat reply. Trigger Master optionally supports heartbeats by letting you set the heartbeat string and reply.

Automation systems usually send a newline as the delimiter for commands in the case of sending more than one at a time. However, the delimiter can be modified to any string.

Additional Notes

Trigger Master has support for verbose logging. When on, you’ll get all the activity on the ports in the logs. It’s essential to have verbose logging on during testing but it’s fine to turn it off in production. We’ll still see exceptions in the logs if verbose logging is turned off. Verbose logging is turned on/off from the Help menu and it’s state is shown in the status bar.

 

Trigger Master is designed to act optionally as a System Tray application. When closing the app, it doesn’t shutdown but instead gets tucked away in the system tray. To relaunch it (show it) from the system tray, either double click it there or right-click the mouse to get options including launching it or shutting it down.