RE: Data Dictionary, Draft 2

[Keith Doxey]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Lowe [mailto:<a
href="/group/ukha_xpl/post?postID=WBuY95RR7v3J4sYCZVeyCHVVJaCkLqypMBuc_KPpZKKGWswMZJsb0Nik-bzPnZN9JxBsxjyYc4YzR8wVRpc">ian@w...</a>]
>
> In particular, the suggestion Keith just made.. INPUT and
> SOURCE seem to me
> pretty similar, I'm bowing to greater knowledge on that one...
>

I will explain the difference in the KAT5 context.

SOURCE which was already in the dictionary is what I would call the thing
you are viewing.

INPUT is more for configuration of the switcher.

The switcher will have upto 16 PHYSICAL Inputs but these get mapped to
sources. For example, many people will have a set-top box such as FreeView
or SkyDigital. These will be connected to a physical input, however,
because
each of these boxes has multiple channels, the KAT5 switcher will be able
to
send IR codes to them to change the channel when selecting the device for
viewing and this would be done by configuring a SOURCE as the configuration
you required eg...

SOURCE INPUT SendIRCode SOURCENAME

05 02(Freeview) 05 Five
21 02(Freeview) xx CBBC
22 02(Freeview) xx CBeebies
23 03(SkyDigibox) 106 Sky One
24 03(SkyDigibox) 127 Paramount
25 03(SkyDigibox) 133 Discovery H&amp;L
26 03(SkyDigibox) 551 Discovery

etc. You could still just use the digibox as a normal source and manually
send commands but I am just attempting to make it more user freindly.

Take the case of Tivo, it has two physical inputs that it records from, the
Tuner and the SCART, yet you can set it up to have Digibox on SCART and
Terrestrial/FreeView via the tuner. When you choose a channel or SOURCE on
Tivo, it selects the correct physical input eg Tuner/SCART and then sends
the appropriate IR commands to the set-top box and/or tunes the tuner to
the
correct UHF channel. This is what I want to achieve for KAT5 and INPUT is
used as part of the mapping for config only. I would never expect INPUT to
be used as a day to day command.

A similar analogy occurs with lighting systems as well where physical
dimmers are allocated to specific channels in a lighting design. Lutron
certainly do that and I would assume other manufacturers do similar.

If you require a large capacity lighting circuit in a particular room then
you basically have two choices.

1. Buy a very high capacity dimmer which tends to be very expensive and if
it fails you lose everything
2. Use several lower capacity dimmers allocated to the same
"channel" which
gives the same effect as a large dimmer but with added resiliance because a
blown dimmer will only kill some of the lights.

I am in full agreement with the definitions of Zone and ZoneName and with
KAT5 control would be by ZONE but wherever information was displayed it
would use the more freindly ZONENAME eg

ZONE=01
ZONENAME=Lounge

ZONE=02
ZONENAME=Kitchen

etc

The suggestion of INPUT was something that I would see a need for but it
could be in a specific schema rather than the main dictionary, or I could
choose only to allow the configuration from the front panel of the
switcher.

Keith

www.diyha.co.uk
www.kat5.tv