Roku HD2000 manual Creating Interactive Displays, Using Excel to Create Interactive Signs

Creating Interactive Displays

With BrightSign you can create displays that respond to user input. For example, give the customer options of watching different videos depending on which button is pressed. To accomplish this with BrightSign, you need to decide what the input device will be, and you will need to either (a) use Microsoft Excel to create a control table and use BrightSign’s “autoplay .CSV files” mode, or (b) create a custom control script.

Using Excel to Create Interactive Signs

This mode is implemented using the “autoplay” script available on Roku’s web site. See the prior section “Auto Executing a “.CSV” File Upon Power-Up” for more information.

BrightSign has a powerful mode whereby it can play a sophisticated sign that is described in a “.CSV” file. CSV stands for “comma separated values”, and is a simple text file that contains a table of information. Using Microsoft Excel you can create a CSV file that describes a sophisticated interactive sign using a text table. The table describes which media to play, and which media to play when a user presses a button or triggers other events.

A good example of a CSV file is the one used in the Roku BrightSign demo. Run the demo as described in the introduction. Then find the file “autoplay.csv” in the zip file. Copy it out of the zip file onto your desktop, then double click it to load it into Microsoft Excel (you must have Excel installed on your computer. If not, you can load it into any text editor, but it won’t be displayed in the nice tabular format). After you edit the file, you can save it with “Save As…” and select “CSV” as the file format to save as.

Below is a section of the autoplay.csv file from the Roku demo. Due to space limitations on the page, it does not include all the columns. The extra columns (not seen below) to the right are similar to the “elo” columns, and describe what happens when buttons are pressed, or when a video finishes or a slide times out.

VIDEOMODE	1024x768x60p
IMAGEMODE		1
EVENTS			elo:110:18	elo:510:180:350:2	elo:110:400:350:2	elo:510:400:	elo:0:0:1024:768
			0:350:200	00	00	350:200
STATE	demo_menu.bmp		Dalmations	art1.bmp	cars.mpg	bs1.bmp
			.mpg
STATE	Dalmations.mpg						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	Cars.mpg						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	art1.bmp						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	art2.bmp						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	art3.bmp						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	art4.bmp						demo_menu.bmp
STATE	bs1.bmp					bs2.bmp
STATE	bs2.bmp					bs3.bmp
STATE	bs3.bmp					bs4.bmp
STATE	bs4.bmp					bs5.bmp

20