spectrum colour touchscreen

looking through the PICED template files, i noticed that 5.of only templates were available for this unit. can i not use any of the 'colour' (ctouch) touchscreen templates on the smaller spectrum screen ?

 

You can try loading one of the other templates and then converting it to use on a Spectrum, but I suspect you may be less than impressed by the result, as the Colour C-Touch has a higher resolution than the spectrum and supports a bunch more features.

 

yeah and just don't expect to quickly dump anything into the screen
allow yourself
a coffee break while it uploads to the unit -

and when I mean a break I mean

get a flight to brazil fly and pick your coffee beans then fly back roast them and then grind them then use them in whatever machine you like sit down and enjoy your coffee while the upload finishes.

 

is that cause of the difference in screen/template size from colour to spectrum ?

furthermore, apart from the res issue, does it actually resize all page components to fit the spectrum page ?

running late on a project, this is first the spectrum job, got plenty of self made BW and colour templates, was wanting to rip a template and get going fast, not to brazil though !

thanks for your input guys

 

PICED does re-size some of the components and the fonts, but any fixed-size graphics require manual re-sizing which is why re-using colour C-Touch templates and converting them doesn't work very well. PICED does a better job enlarging a project from a Spectrum/B&W C-touch up to Colour C-Touch size than it does the other way around. The best you can do is suck-it-and-see because the ability to scale down a Colour C-touch project to a Spectrum size will depend to some extent on how the project has been constructed and which graphical elements have been used.

When transferring the project to the unit, the form that allows you to specify the virtual com port of the unit also allows you to set the speed of the transfer. The default is 38400 bps from memory, which is glacially slow, but you can set it up to 500,000 bps. I find that even when set to maximum, an upload to a Spectrum takes 10 - 15 minutes. I use the Simulate function of PICED a lot more with the Spectrum to cut down on the number of times I download the project.

 

what if you don't drink coffee?

 

^^ guess you could brew yourself a keg of beer? lol

 

Spectrum Display

Got my first Spectrum the other day and have been quite pleased initially. However, I find that besides the excruciatingly slow upload, there are a few more issues, which I would not have expected:

The display has a notable flimmer on all but the white backgrounds. It seems like a slow and pronounced refresh rate. I thought it was set too bright, and did another upload after adjusting the max brightness, but this did not improve anything.

That raises another point, in that I would have hoped that screen brightness, not contrast, could be adjusted on the Touch Screen itself without having to upload a new project version. Or am I missing something here?

The calibration of the screen, even after re-calibrating, is really not good at all. It is the same issue as has been raised elsewhere regarding the big Colour Touch. As a result, buttons situated at the center and bottom right of the screen need to be pressed at a notable lower position that displayed. This also makes schedule and scene selection quite a challenge.

I am wondering if I have received a bit of a dud, or if this is normal?

Cheers
Thomas

 

Tweaking your CTouch Spectrum

Hi,

Its definitely slower than a B&W touchscreen as it has heaps more data to transfer. Make sure you have the baud rate in Options | Program Options | Connections set to 500k bps. If your baud rate is left at 38400 or something the transfer time will blow way out.

Try adjusting your contrast. If your contrast values are not right for your typical viewing angle you may get some flicker. You should be able to remove it by tweaking the contrast.

You're not missing anything - it cant be done on the unit. We've thought about this before but not implemented it. I've logged the request in our database - #21366.

Its not a dud and its not normal! We've found a bug in our calibration code that was causing this issue on the Spectrum and B&W CTouch units. This is in test and will be fixed in the next firmware release which his coming soon. Sorry for the troubles.
This issue and fix is in no way related to the Colour CTouch.

Hopefully with the firmware update and the tweaks above we'll soon have you back to quite pleased!

Mark

 

Hi Mark,

Thank you for your quick reply.

W.r.t. flimmer, I have changed settings, and got to one which seems to be better. I had also reduced the brightness setting by approx 15%, and think that also helped.
I am definitely looking forward to the brightness adjustment in future. It looks like the Spectrum has loads more memory, and hopefully also a more powerful processor, so this extra facility should not impact on performance.

Looking forward also to the calibration fix. I think that is more important than the brightness issue.

I am not sure if you deal with the big Colour Touch, but it also suffers from bad calibration. It is an issue that I have noticed on quite a number of them, and it seems to have started between a year or two ago.

Thank you for your efforts, and enjoy the weekend!

Thomas