Button Pad
Forty-five buttons, each one a bundle of sound, lights and moves. Press them from your transmitter, from your radio's touch screen, or right here in the browser.
What it’s for
Section titled “What it’s for”A button is anything you want your droid to do on cue: a scream, a wave, an alarm with flashing lights, a full timed show. Your transmitter’s button switch (or the ETHOS touch-screen pad) picks which one. DroidFX has three pages of fifteen, laid out exactly like the ETHOS widget, so the web page and your radio always match.
Quick start: set up a button
Section titled “Quick start: set up a button”- Open Button Pad and switch to Set up.
- Tap the button you want to change. Empty ones say + Set up.
- Give it a name and a colour. These also show on your radio’s pad after you export.
- Choose what it does. Play a sequence is the easiest way to combine sound, lights and moves. For something simple, use Quick actions.
- Press Save button. It works straight away; press it from your transmitter to try it.
How a button behaves
Section titled “How a button behaves”Every button has one of four behaviours. New buttons start as Momentary.
| Behaviour | What a press does | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Momentary | On while held, off when you let go. | Holding a periscope up, a sound only while pressed. |
| Toggle | Press on, press again off. Other buttons layer on top. | Alarm lights, a looping sound. |
| One-shot | Fires every press; nothing stays on. | Screams, beeps, a wave. |
| Stop all | Turns every button off and stops all sound and sequences. | A safety button. Keep one on page 1. |
Buttons layer, they don’t replace
Section titled “Buttons layer, they don’t replace”A Toggle button is an on/off switch, not “this one instead”. Turn one on, then another, and the second one’s lights layer on top of what’s already lit. Press a button again to turn just its own lights off; everything else stays. If two buttons name the same light, the earlier one (page 1 first, then the lower number) keeps it.
- A Toggle button’s sound plays when it turns on; turning it off is silent.
- A button with no lights or sequences just plays its sound on every press.
- A Momentary button held on the web page lets go by itself within 2 s if the connection drops.
- A One-shot button’s sequences run to their end; it has no lights of its own (put them in a sequence).
Stop all
Section titled “Stop all”Any button can be a Stop all button: it turns every button off and stops all sound, sequences, previews and messages. Page 1’s button 15 is one by default. A lost radio signal does the same. On a droid with moving parts, it’s worth the slot.
What a button can do
Section titled “What a button can do”Play a sequence
Section titled “Play a sequence”Pick a sequence from the Sequences page. Turn on Loop while on to repeat it for as long as the button is on (Toggle and Momentary).
Quick actions
Section titled “Quick actions”| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sound | None, one track, a random track from a range, or each track in a range in turn. Tracks show the names from your track list. |
| Lights | Up to four lights, each switched to one of its presets while the button is on. |
| More sequences | Up to four extra sequences, each with its own Loop. |
| More | A delay before the sound, and Repeat while the button is on. |
Pressing buttons from the browser
Section titled “Pressing buttons from the browser”In Play, tap a button exactly as you would on the transmitter. A gold outline means it’s on. Hold the tiles marked HOLD; tiles marked 1× flash once. A small radio marker shows the page the transmitter is on. The toolbar has the radio’s state, Bench mode, Message… and Stop all.
In Set up, each button is saved on its own, and Prev / Next walk all 45. A button also has a second line (the radio shows two lines of 16 characters) and a text colour: Automatic (black or white, whichever reads), Black or White.
Send a message
Section titled “Send a message”Message… shows a one-off line of text on a panel without saving anything: pick the panel, type, choose a mode, font, colour, speed and how many times, then Send. It appears on top of whatever that light is playing, and goes away by itself; Stop or Stop all end it sooner. It follows the same rules as a preset (lights on, the master switch on, and the radio connected or Bench mode on), and if it can’t show, the page says why. Your last few messages are kept as quick picks. See Scrolling text.
Pages 2 and 3
Section titled “Pages 2 and 3”Pages 2 and 3 work once DroidFX knows which page the radio is showing: set Button page in Droid Config’s radio channel map to the channel the ETHOS widget’s page goes out on. Without it, only page 1 can be pressed, though you can set up pages 2 and 3 already.
Showing your buttons on an ETHOS radio
Section titled “Showing your buttons on an ETHOS radio”- In Set up, press Export to ETHOS… and download the pad file. It’s named after your droid, e.g.
B2EMO.txt. - Copy it into a folder named
padsnext to the DroidFX widget’scfg_….txtfiles, that isSCRIPTS:/droidfx/pads/, on whichever storage the widget is installed on (radio or SD card). - On the radio, long-press the widget → Configure → Pad source → your file.
After changing buttons, export and copy again, then choose Reload pad. More in The ETHOS widget.
Under the hood for the curious
Every exported button is sent as a momentary press: DroidFX itself does the toggling, holding and one-shots, so the radio only reports presses. A page change alone never counts as a press. Labels show up to 16 characters per line, two lines per button.
Trouble?
Section titled “Trouble?”- A button does nothing: check its behaviour, that the LED master switch is on, and the link status.
- Pages 2–3 fire page 1’s buttons: the page channel isn’t set.
- The pad file doesn’t appear on the radio: it must sit next to the widget’s
cfg_files.
More in Troubleshooting.