Release 1.1 (September 12, 2005)

This software was not released to customers.

Features

NWare/NION General

• Added support for XControl trigger-style controls. There are now two options for PASHA serial control protocol - PASHA/PageMatrix and PASHA/XControl. Use the latter so that the T command acts as an XControl trigger command. PASHA/PageMatrix is the same as the old PASHA protocol.

There is a new version of the RATC control protocol - RATC2 RAW. It supports control access to all controls without the use of control aliases. Instead of using a control alias to reference a control, a string based on the device_id of the parent device and the ruid of the control is used (in the form //devices/device_id/controls/control_ruid, where device_id and control_ruid must be determined using the Inspector window). In addition, the external controller must know which NioNode or nControl node each control resides on when using RATC2 RAW.

Note: This protocol is intended for advanced external control and should not be used as a replacement for standard RATC2.

• CAB serial bridging raw MAC mode: added raw MAC-based RS-485 CAB addressing for ControlMatrix compatibility. This check box is hidden within the advanced section of the CAB properties dialog box.
• Added block property to only require a single click to open a block while in gesture mode.
• Added a setting on the User Preferences dialog box called Deep Locate that allows the GUI to open blocks when locating objects by clicking on the compile results or the find results. This preference defaults to checked which allows the existing behavior. If the preference is unchecked, the GUI will highlight the block containing the locate target, but will not open that block. This means it will take more clicks to actually get to the located object, but some may find this less confusing than having blocks pop open automatically.
• Added NioNode Diagnostics to NWare. It is currently in a somewhat unfinished state.

  Note: Before running diagnostics, the role running on the NioNode must be erased or the diagnostics will fail and bad audio may come out of the system.

• Added new ExpressionLabel auto label generator syntax.  This replaces the older AutoNumber Flyoffs and AutoNumber Labels dialogs. This function is much more powerful than the AutoNumber function.
• Added new 'Gesture Wipe' mode. In this mode, if a click-drag operation is started on either a button control or empty space, any button that is passed over while the mouse button is down is automatically pressed/released.  This mode is useful for running on touchscreen computers. To enabled this mode, add the following to the \plugins\nware\preferences.xml or \plugins\nware\kiosk_preferences.xml:

  <item name="enable_wipe_gesture" value="true" />

• Added full-screen option. Available from right click context menu or command line option ( /fullscreen=true )
• Added an enable control to the blinker device.
• Added new Duplicate Special... command (CTRL+SHIFT+D) which allows a user to specify the orientation (horizontal/vertical) and number of copies to create.

New Devices

• Added the Signal Probe device. The Signal Probe works across a set of NioNodes connected by XDAB, and allows the end-user to dynamically monitor any wire or device wiring node.
• A Wave File Recorder device has been added. That's right - you can now record wave files as well as play them. The number of channels that can be recorded simultaneously on a NioNode has not been fully determined. We also probably need a scheme to protect against the NioNode running out of disk space while recording - proceed with appropriate caution.
• Added a Huge Mixer Controller device. This virtual device provides a single set of send controls that are mapped, by pressing a select button, to the array of send controls in a (potentially) big mixer made up of multiple mixers, each producing some of the outputs.
• Added an Auto Group control device. Place this inside a hierarchical block and all of the read-write controls from the other devices inside that hierarchical block with the same ruid will be automatically grouped together. Use this to make stereo or multi-channel devices where all channels share the same settings.

  Note: This does not work very well for graphic equalizers.

• Added a Register control device. This multi-channel device latches the values of the input controls on the rising edge of the clock input and sets the latched values to the outputs on the falling edge of the clock input. This is useful from creating certain kinds of logic (like state machines) that are otherwise difficult due to race conditions.
• Added the Control Router device.

Improvements

• Modified X-Control Device to work with the automatic control wiring assignment.
• Modified PageMatrix device to be able to generate versions with more than 16 paging stations.  The PageMatrix hardware only supports 16 stations, but many people use the PageMatrix device without the hardware and might need very big devices. The maximum is now 99 stations and 99 zones.

  Note: Large PageMatrix devices can take several minutes to generate. NWare may become unresponsive during this time.

• Improved error reporting of sample rate mismatches in compile results.
• Improved error reporting of wiring between NioNodes without XDAB.
• Endpoint hover text is now shown when wiring to make it easier to tell what you are wiring to.
• Project compile settings now validate property values so that dangerous values are disallowed.
• Increased the default attack time of the Limiter from 100us to 10ms in order to avoid signal distortion.
• Previously, if only one NioNode was wired to an XDAB, the compile would succeed, but during runtime XDAB failures would cause the NioNode to mute. Now the compile will fail with a message ...only one NioNode wired to this XDAB....
• Fixed warning messages when NWare is launched after ControlManager has been run as a service on the same PC.
• The Wave Recorder and Player do not require the .wav extension to be entered in the File Name control. If the file name does not end in .wav (or .WAV), the .wav extension will be assumed. This fixes the situation where a wave file can be recorded with a name that overwrites one of the units configuration files, rendering it unable to run the role.
• Improved performance on CAB control. Previously, the poll time would increase linearly with the number of CABs at 200ms*num_cabs. Now the poll time should be a constant 200ms for all CABs regardless of how many CABs the NioNode is controlling. It is suggested that a NioNode should not control more than 8 CABs.
• Hover text can now be changed from the control properties.
• Hovering or selecting a control with a control alias displays the alias in the status bar.  The text associated with the control will also be displayed in the status bar.
• Added graphic object property to lock the size so it cannot be resized by click-dragging on the object.

Python

• In scripts, calling changes_get() on an input now works with threaded scripts. Once called, the changed state is cleared on both threaded and regular scripts.
• The Python script editor now supports find ( CTRL+F ) and find/replace ( CTRL+H ). Replace All and regular expressions are also supported.
• The Python script editor now gets user confirmation when closing the editor if the script has been changed.
• Added support for data bit, stop bit, parity and full/half-duplex configuration of the Python based serial port. The serial port constructor has 4 optional arguments - serial_port.create( name, baud_rate, data_bits, stop_bits, parity, half_duplex ). See PythonSerial for more information.

NWare: Kiosk

• Removed the unnecessary pace::file warning about missing media.zip when uploading for Kiosk.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the bug which caused the text_box control style dialog to display the Font Size as an empty value, which would in turn cause the text to display infinitely small.
• Fixed a bug which caused the find results to not be clearable.
• Fixed a bug which occasionally made the last line in the Log window unreachable.
• Fixed a compile bug which generated unrunnable DSP code for some designs that used very large SDRAM delay buffers.
• Fixed bug which caused scroll bars to not be visible in certain situations.
• Fixed bugs in 'Save As' code which incorrectly disallowed using 'Save As' to save over the current file as well as saving the same file name to a different directory on the disk.
• Fixed a bug that caused the compile to fail if the output and input of the same channel of an XDAB were wired together. These wiring mistakes should still be avoided.
• Fixed glitch during looped wave file playback.
• Fixed bug where sometimes the tail end of the previous wave file was played when a new file is started.
• Fixed bug which caused the hover 'tooltip' popup to be incorrectly positioned on machines with more than one display.
• Fixed bug which disallowed empty passwords for project users.
• Fixed a bug where the valueIs RATC2 response has an extra % at the end when running on the Nion but not under the emulator.
• The sub-preset controller device is now placed on the NION or ControlNode which contains the greatest number of controls in that Sub-preset domain. This fixes an apparent error in the situation when the NION containing the sub-preset controller contained none of the controls in the sub-preset. In those cases, the sub-preset file did not exist on the NION containing the controller; pressing the load button would result in an error indication, even though the command was successfully sent to the other units that contained portions of the preset and they loaded it successfully.
• Fixed potential instability problem of parametric equalizer in shelf mode.
• Fixed a bug in XDAB'ed systems where some of the NioNodes sent only a small number of channels to the XDAB and others sent many, possibly causing distortion on one of two XDAB channels in the design.