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ControlPortal

Welcome to the PoE Texas Manual for our ControlPortal!

The purpose of the manual is to help you quickly and effectively navigate the creation, installation, and functions of your new ControlPortal.

Our goal is to make our products as intuitive and simple to use as possible, so we value your feedback and questions directly to us at service@poetexas.com. Phone +1-512-479-0317

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Prerequisites

 EQUIPMENT REQUIRED:

The exact amount required depends on the project’s size

  • COR-TAP GATEWAYS

    • At least one for Primary ControlPortal Gateway
    • Any number of Secondary gateways (can act as backup Primary)
  • ControlPortal- COMPATIBLE DEVICES

    • TAB-10

      • Includes an LED Ring Features, Alarms, and Kiosk Mode (requires MDM provisioning for Kiosk)
    • Android Tablet- Any device with Android 8.0 or higher

    • iPad

      • Support for iOS is in beta development and will be available soon for full deployment
    • PC’s and Other Displays:

      • Mac/iOS devices with Safari Browser
      • Windows devices with Chrome Browser
      • Linux devices with Chromium Browser
      • Chrome OS device

Features

Current supported features you’ll want to know about:

MDM Provisioning

(NOT REQUIRED for non-kiosk devices)

Before you start:

Android, iOS, and other devices require an MDM system operate in true kiosk mode.  We also recommend an MDM because you can control the devices’ profiles, distribute applications, configure system settings, remotely connect for assistance (on-premise permission required), track their status (battery, geolocation, etc.), and prevent any sort of tampering including in an event of physical theft.

If you need an MDM account set up and don’t already have an MDM, you can refer to our MDM Initialization Instructions to learn about a system we recommend.  If you require assistance or have any other questions about an MDM please contact our customer success team.

Device Provisioning

To provision an MDM Device please accurately follow the steps described in Chapter 4 of the MDM Initialization Instructions or speak to your MDM service provider.

Enabling ControlPortal (at Primary ControlPortal Gateway)

When you’re ready to create your first ControlPortal page, you will need to enable the ControlPortal for the LAN. Then the ControlPortal can be accessed manually using http://wallstation.local/ (only works for client devices on the same LAN) or will be opened automatically if you are using our ControlPortal app (has to be on the same LAN).

STEPS:

  1. Decide which gateway you are going to make the Primary ControlPortal Gateway. It is a good idea to choose the gateway that is the least likely to undergo any network or structural changes, be offline, or be decommissioned in the future.  If you have enough ControlPortal , we would recommend choosing one ControlPortal as your “ControlPortal ” server.
  2. Visit that gateway’s “Config” page (1).
  3. In the “General Settings” (2) section check the “ControlPortal V2 Primary” checkbox (3). Wait 10 seconds and refresh the page. If the checkbox stays checked it means the activation was successful. If the checkbox isn’t checked please make sure no other Primary ControlPortal Gateway is present on the network or contact our customer support.

Adding Rooms and Adding Objects to Rooms

Next let’s create a Room entity, which is what a ControlPortal will present as a page.  By this point, you should already have all the necessary objects, groups, and sensors created. You can refer to the COR-TAP Gateway documentation for more information.

STEPS:

  1. Navigate to the “Rooms” page of your Primary ControlPortal Gateway
  2. Click the “New” button
  3. Fill in the parameters of your new Room
    • Support Phone and Support Email will be shown and used for the generation of the QR codes in the “Service Contacts” menu.   You can add your own information here.
    • To learn more about Order Locking, please refer to the corresponding chapter
    • To learn more about Service PIN, please refer to the corresponding chapter
    • In the Associated Schedule field, you can choose the gateway the schedule from which will be shown on the Room’s ControlPortal screen
    • Occupancy Sound is the sound that will be played on the Room’s occupancy sensor going into the “occupied” state
    • Custom background is a JPEG image of compatible dimensions (please make sure the dimensions are compatible with the screen, the image will be stretched to attempt to cover both of the sides fully while keeping its aspect ratio, please keep in mind that control elements cover parts of the background).
      Make sure you have the right to use the image.
      You can find free-to-use high-quality background images with a color filter here:
      https://www.pexels.com/search/background/ (100K+ images)
      https://pixabay.com/images/search/background/ (100K+ images)
  4. Click “Ok”
  5. You can now drag and drop the devices you want to be commissioned to that room

Accessing ControlPortal

  1. If you are using an MDM pre-configured Kiosk ControlPortal device it should connect to the Primary ControlPortal Gateway automatically as long as it is on the same LAN and the valid MDM kiosk policy is present (please refer to MDM Initialization Instructions or contact our customer support if you need to get an MDM system set up).
  2. If you are using an Android Device that is not Kiosk you can access ControlPortal by installing our ControlPortal Android App
  3. If you are using a device that supports mDNS/Bonjour name resolution (e.g. all Apple products, Windows 10 Build 1511+, some Linux distributions, etc.) you can use http://wallstation.local/ in Chrome or Safari browser to access ControlPortal on the same LAN.
    • If you are connected to the COR-TAP’s Wi-Fi hotspot use http://wallstationwifi.local/ instead
  4. If you have a device that doesn’t support mDNS/Bonjour, use http://<primary-gateway-name> (where <primary-gateway-name> is the hostname of your Primary ControlPortal Gateway which you can find in your gateway settings, make sure to replace underscores (_) with dashes (-) if there are any underscores present)

Single-room Mode

By default, all ControlPortal clients have access to all Rooms. To limit a client device to a single Room use one of the next methods:

  1. Switch to another Room different from the Room you want to lock the device in and open the Room Selection Menu by tapping the Room’s name. In that menu tap and hold the target Room’s button until the screen is refreshed. The Single-room Mode will now be active.
  2. Alternatively, you can use http://wallstation.local/<room_name> to enter the Single-room Mode via URL.

To exit the Single-room Mode tap the “Disable single-room mode” button in the Service Menu. Please refer to the “Service Menu” chapter for information on how to access it.

To activate:

To disable:

Pinning and order locking

To control the order of Scenes and Devices on the screen you can use next features:
  1. Pinning – by tapping on and holding a Scene or a Device button you can pin it at the top of the corresponding list. Pinned objects are indicated with a star added to their name. Each new pinned object always goes on top of its pinned list, that way you can control the order of the list of the pinned objects by pinning target objects in the desired order.
    To unpin an object tap and hold the target object’s button the same way as you did for pinning it.
  2. Objects from the “More” menu that were recently used go to the top of the corresponding object list after the pinned objects (if there are any). This ensures that devices that are being used frequently are more likely to be on the main object list.
  3. Order locking which you can find in the settings of the Room allows you to disable both Pinning and “More” menu auto-sorting features.  In that case, you can control the order of the objects by adding them to the room in the order you want them to be on the ControlPortal screen. The ControlPortal user will not be able to change the order of the objects from their ControlPortal screen.

Scene-only (Portrait) Mode

If the device screen is too small to effectively display the full version of ControlPortal or you just need it to only display Scenes you can rotate the device that supports orientation change into portrait orientation.

Alternatively, if available, you can make the ControlPortal window height greater than its width which will also enable Portrait Mode.

Gateway-issued commands

In the “Control Commands” subsection of the “General settings” section of the Primary ControlPortal Gateway’s page you can issues next commands:

  1. Override screen brightness value for all ControlPortal
  2. Reload all ControlPortal (refreshes their browser page, if the device is reachable)

LED Ring Features

Only available on Denton LED Ring-enabled devices

  1. Automatic accent color will be calculated from the background image and applied automatically on any background change.
  2. Manual LED Ring overrides are available from the Service Menu (please refer to the Service Menu chapter on how to access it) and will allow you to override both the color and the on/off state of the LED Ring.

Service Menu

Service Menu is a menu that contains Service Controls meant to be only available to authorized personnel.

To access this menu you have to set up the Service PIN in the settings of the Room. Please note, that Service PIN is per-Room, meaning you can access the service menu from that Room only if you know the PIN for that Room. That allows you to have flexible access zones with separated access levels. Please refer to the “Adding Rooms” chapter for more information on setting up a Room.

After the PIN is set up you can access the service menu by opening the “Service Contacts” menu and tapping and holding the text line that contains the ControlPortal IP (1), tapping on the white field that will appear below it (2), entering the PIN correct for the selected Room in the number pad (3), and tapping the blue button (4).

Please refer to the list of features to see what features you can control from the Service Menu.

 

Troubleshooting

  1. If the ControlPortal main screen appears, but you don’t see any controls
    • If you use a 3rd party router your router may lack the support of DHCP DDNS (which generally means it may be undertiered for the purpose of being your building automation router) or you have DNS resolution misconfigured:
      If DHCP DDNS doesn’t work on your LAN you should aim to fix your network DNS resolution, you can contact our technical support which will provide you with further steps.
      Alternatively, you can try to use the MultiVerse network map fallback, by going to the “General Settings” and unchecking “ControlPortal use DHCP DDNS”, but it is not recommended as a permanent solution (as faulty DHCP DDNS often indicates other issues on the network) and is not guaranteed to resolve the issue. It also depends on network multicast working properly.
    • There are other potential network and configuration issues that may lead to that general symptom, as it basically indicates that the ControlPortal web app itself was delivered to the client device, but the delivered app couldn’t initialize the configuration and controls. Please contact our customer support for further diagnostics.
  2. ControlPortal doesn’t load at all
    • Please check your network status and direct LAN reachability of the Primary ControlPortal Gateway. It often means that either the client device is offline, or that the Primary ControlPortal Gateway is offline.
    • Your router or network may have issues with multicast and mDNS. In that case please contact our customer support.
  3. ControlPortal screen restarts (blinks) and doesn’t stop
    • There are some issues with your network or configuration that ControlPortal could not resolve automatically, please contact customer support.
  4. Alarms stop working after the screen goes to sleep
    • If you are running ControlPortal Android App make sure it is added to the battery optimization exceptions. That is dealt with natively in Denton devices.
    • For other devices and operating systems make sure the device doesn’t go to sleep or puts the app to sleep. For example, your native phone call app and alarm clock are only able to immediately deliver you a call and wake you up on time because they are system apps that are added to the battery optimization exceptions by default. Due to mobile operating system policies 3rd party apps are not allowed to acquire those permissions (as well as most other permissions) automatically.
  5. Some controls are unavailable
    • If you can’t use some control you’ve been able to use previously it may mean that the gateway that provides those controls is currently offline. Please check the connection and contact customer support if you are unable to resolve the issue.

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