Description:

The RedRadio Rad-IO device is not controlled by a CQC driver, instead it is a system that you can use in conjunction with CQC to provide up to 8 touch pads throughout the house via Cat5 cables, for a very reasonable price. Effectively this system is a specialized VGA card, in which the 640x480 display area is divided into 8 160x240 sections. Anything displayed in one of those sections is shown on the associated touch screen, and any presses on one of the touch screens show up as a click within that area of the display. So the output from 0,0 to 159,239 goes to the first touch panel display, and a touch on the middle of that touch panel shows up as a click at 79, 119 on the computer hosting the Rad-IO system.

The CQC Interface Viewer has been updated to support this system. You can start it with a command line in the form /RadIO=x, where x is a number 1 through 8. The Interface viewer will start up in a frameless mode, at the right 'octant' to show up on touch pad x. That touch pad will then be seeing its own instance of the interface viewer and can interact with it independently of any of other instances. The RadIO mode parameter also forces the use of a special 'please wait' window for longer running actions invoked from the users interfaces, which will fit correctly in the size/aspect ratio of the Rad-IO touch panels, and which uses no high end graphical or image features, something not well supported on a display of this size and VGA mode.

The Rad-IO card cannot coexist with other cards in the same computer, and it limits the resolution to 640x480, so it is not recommended that you install it in your main controller machine. Instead, you should use a small secondary computer on which you can just install the CQC client components. It can handle running the Rad-IO touch screens, which will both relieve the main controller from that burden and allow the main controller to have a standard display for local administration. The secondary computer can be quite small and light weight, and RedRadio actually sells a specialized machine for this purpose.

Since the Interface Viewer comes up with any menus or frame window, you must give it a user interface to start on. This can be done either by starting it on a CQC user account that has an assigned initial user interface template, or you can provide on on the command line via the /InitTmpl=\User\xxx parameter, where xxx is the name of the template to load. You can exit these small Interface Viewer instances by click on one to give it the input focus, and then doing the usual Alt-F4 Windows exit command. It will just exit immediately without any confirmation.

To simplify starting up these instances of the Interface Viewer, you could make a command file that looks something like the following, then open the CQC Command Prompt and invoke the command file.

@ECHO OFF 
SETLOCAL 
SET CQC_USERNAME=Bubba 
SET CQC_PASSWORD=Bubbalicious 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=1 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=2 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=3 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=4 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=5 /Load=\User\RadIOZ5 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=6 /Load=\User\RadIOZ6 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=7 /Load=\User\RadIOZ7 
CQCIntfView /RadIO=8 

In this example, SETLOCAL is used to allow us to set some local environment values that will be thrown away when the command file completes, and we then set up a CQC user name and password, likely a Limited User account, to which some initial interface template has been assigned. We then start up all 8 instances of the Interface Viewer, but for zones 5, 6, and 7 we override the default template for the user, and load another template specific for those zones.

Quirks and Limitations:

Be careful when using this mode to start the Interface Viewer because the multi-instance suppression mechanism is overridden. If you had a command file like the above and ran it when there were already 8 instances running, you'd just get 8 more and it would not be visually evident that this had happened because new new ones would just overlay the old ones. So make sure you aren't starting up more than you think you..

Connection Details

See the Rad-IO web site for more information, but basically the Rad-IO system requires Cat-5 cabling to the touch screens, and provides power over the Cat-5 cable to the touch screens, so no power is required at each panel.