Helm Designer

Drag-and-drop control panel designer

Giving Your Operators the Control They Need

Helm Designer is at the heart of the Helm system. It’s the tool that station engineers use to design and deploy software control panels for a huge range of applications.

Building a panel is easy: Just drag icons representing the devices to be controlled onto the panel from the parts bin. Next, add visual controls like buttons, sliders and meters. These allow the operator to interact with the panel. To finish, dress the panel with custom graphics, logos or text, or add live video using NewTek NDI® windows for monitoring.

Helm supports a huge range of devices, including routers, servers, branding systems and modular gear. Many of these have special visual controls, such as router buses and server transport buttons.

You can customise the look and feel of all visual controls. Fonts, colours, images and text can all be changed to give the perfect look for your panel.

Simple control or total flexibility

For controlling devices, Helm Designer gives you a wide range of choices, from click-and-link simplicity through to total flexibility.

Property Links are great for simple interactions between controls and devices. Just select a control, and link it to any property exposed by the device. This works for buttons, indicators, faders and many other visual controls.

Helm Designer also has a simple macro-style language. This allows a list of actions to be executed in order. It’s ideal for controlling several devices with a single button-press. The powerful editor lets you edit these easily, just by selecting actions and parameters from lists.

For the ultimate in flexibility, Helm supports both Lua and JavaScript programming languages. These offer an ideal compromise between power and speed. The built-in code editor and help system give assistance along the way.

Web panels and native PC panels

Native Control panels

Native panels run on Windows PC’s with the Helm Runtime engine. They can be deployed to operators’ workstations via email, file sharing or thumb drives. These panels can control the full range of supported devices.

You can use Lua and Classic scripting in native panels, but not JavaScript

Web-based Control

Web Panels are built in the same way as native panels, and are deployed straight from Helm Designer to WebCentre.  Because WebCentre controls panel security, panel access is restricted according to a user’s role.

Web Panels run in any modern browser. They don’t require any plugins or extensions because they’re based on HTML 5 standards and JavaScript. Scripts for Web Panels can use Classic scripts, Lua and, of course, JavaScript.

At present, web panels can’t be used to control all broadcast devices. If you’d like more details, please contact us.

Features
  • Drag-and-drop panel design
  • Build panels for PC or web browsers
  • Fully customisable visual controls
  • Alignment guides, grids and positioning tools
  • Panel deployment to WebCentre
  • Property Links
  • “Classic” macro scripts
  • Lua
  • JavaScript
  • Make your own “favourite” controls
  • Copy and paste controls between panels
Visual Controls
  • Buttons
  • Labels
  • Images
  • Text Fields
  • Drop-down Lists
  • Faders
  • Meters
  • Button Groups
  • Status Indicators
  • NDI® Live Video
  • Microsoft DirectShow Live Video
  • Tables
  • List Boxes
  • Embedded Web content