How To: Using xlobby to send events to girder.

[trevis]

I spent almost 3 hours attempting to do this for the first time yesterday evening so I figured i'd post what i learned to speed up the process for anyone else attempting to do it.

* I'm assuming that you have some basic understanding of Girder and Xlobby, if not, this probably wont help you much. *

First things first! Go to girder and copy ‘gireventlib.dll’ into your xlobby directory. (Anywhere in the windows path should do.) If you don’t have this, xlobby will throw an exception every time you try to communicate with Girder.

Second. Go into girder and build your command or command group. Get it working within girder and test it just to emanate that as being a variable.

Once you’re happy with the command do ‘add eventstring’ under the new command. Near the top center of the event configuration screen change that drop down item from ‘all’ to ‘girder event’ and then press ‘learn event’ that will pop up a small dialog window which will let you key in a name for your event. This name is how you can launch the event from girder.

Now go into xlobby and create a new button. Once you create the button and assign a graphic to it, go to the ‘Girder Event Strings’ tab for that new button and in the big text area simply type in the name that you gave to you event in the earlier step.

If you got things just right, pressing that button in xlobby should cause the girder event to execute.

Optional:
If you’re having problems and want to test your ‘event string’ outside of xlobby, open a command window and go to the girder directory. Now with girder running in the system tray execute:

girder.exe -eventstring myEvent

Where "myEvent" is the name that you gave to your event in girder.

I hope this helps.
Good luck.

[Roscoe62]

That's pretty handy,

Thanks for sharing that Trevis!

I'll be getting into just this kind of stuff very soon.

Cheers

[gravy]

Wow - thanks for the great instructions! It took 15 mins to get xlobby/girder controlling all aspects of my receiver!

This just keeps getting more fun!

Thanks again!

[MFan]

trevis,

Thank you for posting the tips on using girder. I was puzzling over using girder with xlobby for a while. After I found your post, I was able to get girder working very quickly.

Thanks!!

[Arthur]

Trevis,

Thanks for sharing that information. Only thing I had to change in the girder program was "enable input devices (F9)".

Arthur

[randomjohn]

Second. Go into girder and build your command or command group. Get it working within girder and test it just to emanate that as being a variable.

If you could provide just one step-by-step example, I would be forever grateful. Even something as simple as how you made it so the navigate UP button worked in girder, and from there I'm sure I could figure out the rest. My big problem with girder is that there seems to be this magical "aha!" moment, that everyone has (except me), after which it all makes perfect sense, but after that moment, noone explains how they got there.

[MFan]

randomjohn,

Maybe I can help with an example. Suppose you want to send the command 455 into xlobby by pressing 5 on your keyboard.
Goto the girder window and select the pull down menu Edit
Select the command Add Command
A command (looks like a diagonal bar) should show up in the left window, named New - make sure it is highlighted
Go to the window in the lower right corner and select the Command tab and select Command in the pull down window.
In the entry box labelled WParam, type in 55555, in the box labeled LParam type in 455 and then press the Apply button - make sure you press Apply or your change will not stick, but you will soon learn this lesson when you start using girder regurlarly.
Now go to the pull down window next to the Learn Event button at the upper right and select Girder Event.
Press the Learn event button and when the dialog box pops up, type in 5 and press the enter button.

That's it for this item. Now, assuming you have configured a button with the 455 code in xlobby, every time you press 5 on your keyboard the action of that button should take place - as long as xlobby is the program in focus on your screen! You could have configured the command we added above as a mulitgroup command and had girder make sure that focus is set on girder, but that next week's lesson.

Once you get this down, explore the various tabs in the lower right box and with a little experimentation, you will find that you can do most anything with girder that you could do with a keyboard (even somethings you can't do with the keyboard). With a little more experimentation, you can learn how to execute commands from your remote.

Hope this helps - if it is of some help, let me know what is not clear and I will try to clarify.

Don