Knowledge base

EC Accessories and Transmitters

Environment control transmitters

Your environment control transmitters are all configured from File > Preferences. These settings are for your computer and apply to all your Users.

Migration of settings

In The Grid 2.8 and earlier, these settings were stored for each User and changed from User Settings. The first time you open a User in The Grid 2.9, these settings will be copied from that User to the new Program Settings location. For most people who use environment control this will be fine because the User that they open will already be configured with their settings. If you use multiple users with different environment control settings, you may need to manage this migration more carefully.

Environment control accessories and actions

The Grid 2.9 introduces two new concepts for environment control: accessories and actions.

Environment control accessories

An environment control accessory is a device that can be controlled by The Grid 2, such as the television in your lounge or the hi-fi in your bedroom.

When you configure environment control on a user’s computer, you can set up which accessories they have. You can add up to 25 accessories of each type (television, telephone, audio, chair, bed, sockets, lights, etc).

Configuring an environment control accessory

From File > Preferences, you can open the window to configure the environment control accessories. You only need to configure each environment control accessory once. It can then be used by any of your grid sets.

You provide a name for the accessory, such as “TV in lounge”, to make it easy to remember which is which. You also select which environment controller you want to use to control this accessory.
Each accessory has a set of actions. For example, the television has actions for the actions “power”, “1”, “2”, “3”, and so on.

Once you have added an environment control accessory you can then specify how to send each action in turn by learning from your remote control.

Using environment control actions in Grids

If you want to make a cell that sends one of the environment control actions, you use the new Send and Environment Control action command.
In the command you can select which environment control action to send. In the example above the “power” environment control action will be sent to your “television” environment control accessory.

Working with multiple environment control accessories

If you have more than one accessories, you can switch between them with the new Select Environment Control accessory command.
After the cell with this command has been selected, The Grid 2 will send any environment control actions to “television 2” instead of “television 1”.