Kullanım Kılavuzu
Schuar ESL demo kiti.
Model 1.00
RBS – Radyo Baz İstasyonu
ESL – Elektronik Raf Etiketi
B/W – Mavi Beyaz
B/W/R – Mavi Beyaz Kırmızı
B/W/Y – Mavi beyaz Sarı
Kutuda aşağıdaki öğeler bulunur:
* Bir RBS cihazı
* RBS cihazı için güç adaptörü
* Bir Ethernet kablosu
* Satın alma işlemine bağlı olarak ESL cihazı(ları).
* Yazılım CD'si ve ESL Manager yazılımı (bölgeye bağlı olarak). Yazılımı ayrıca cihazın resmi sitesinden de indirebilirsiniz:
* Güç adaptörünü RBS cihazının güç girişine bağlayın.
* Ethernet kablosunu RBS cihazının ethernet soketine bağlayın.
* Ethernet kablosunun diğer ucunu PC'nizin ethernet soketine bağlayın.
* Güç adaptörünü ana şebekeye bağlayın (100 - 240V AC, 50-60 Hz).
* ESLDemo.zip dosyasını bir dizine açın. ESLDemoInstall.exe isimli bir program olmalı.
* ESL demo programını kurmak için dosyayı çalıştırın ve sihirbazı izleyin.
* Kurulumun başarıyla tamamlandığından emin olun.
Not: Yazılım , Zint barkod jeneratörü projesinden bir üçüncü taraf bileşeni kullanır . Bu projenin ek bilgi ve kaynak kodu için lütfen http://zint.org.uk bakın.
The default IP parameters of the RBS device are:
* Network configuration: Static
* IP address: 192.168.4.10
* Network mask: 255.255.255.0
* Default gateway: 192.168.4.1
Configure the following IP parameters for your ethernet interface:
* Network configuration: Static
* IP address: 192.168.4.2 (or any address between 192.168.4.2 – 192.168.4.254, except 192.168.4.10)
* Network mask: 255.255.255.0
* Default gateway: Leave empty
The login window will appear:
Enter “test” in the User name box.
Enter “test” in the Password box.
Press “Connect” button.
The application window will open.

In order to send any information to ESL devices they have to be discovered and added to the system.
Select ESL tab by choosing Electronic Shelf Label item in the tab selector window.
The ESL tab will be open. It will be empty when the software is launched for the first time:
Press the Discover icon. The “Discovered ESL list” window will be open:
The Discovered ESL list window contains discovered nearby ESL items which are not the part of the system yet. Every discovered item has the following properties:
MAC address. A 32-bit number unique for each device.
Type. The variant of the device. For example, the device with 4.2 Black/Red/White screen will be shown as 4.2” B/R/W.
RBS. The RBS which has found the device and the level of the signal in dB. Closer the device to the RBS, stronger the signal level will be. Lower is better. Very close devices to RBS should have something around 44 – 48dB.
In the Discovered ESL list window click the Add button on the left column of the desired discovered item. The device will be moved from Discovered ESL list window to the ESL table. In order to add another device click Add button of this device too. After adding all the desired devices press Close button. The Discovered ESL list window will be closed. You will see all added devices in a table on the Electronic Shelf Label tab. We’ll call it the ESL table:
When devices are added to the system, the system creates an images with some information about the devices and schedules these images for sending to them. The Status column of these devices in the ESL table will be shown as Queued. In a 30 seconds the devices will wake up and receive these images. For example, a device with 1.5” will be updated with an information like on the right side.
When some ESL is selected in the ESL table the system shows its parameters in the property window. Some parameters are read only, but others can be changed. The properties are:
ID – The identifier of the ESL device inside the system
MAC Address - An 32-bit number unique for each device
Name – The short name user can assign to each device for easy searching (optional)
Description – Any comment about the device for additional information (optional)
Type – The type of the device
Status – The current status of the device. Some important statuses are:
Idle – the device is active in the system and ready to receive information.
Queued – the system scheduled some information to the device and waiting for the connection.
Connected – the system is in the active connection with the device and is sending/receiving information.
Lost – the device went out of coverage and system did not receive any message from it for a long time.
Failed – some error occurred during sending information to the device.
RBS – the id of the radio base station which serves the ESL
Battery voltage – the battery voltage of the device.
Firmware version – the version of the software in the device.
Images – when a user presses these buttons, the system shows some image to be shown on the screen of the device. There are two images:
Current – the image which is shown on the screen of the device now.
Pending – the image system wants to send. It is shown only in Queued state. As soon as the image is sent successfully this image goes to the Current and Pending becomes empty.
Product – the id and name of the product assigned to the ESL. The server generates and sends images to the device according to this product.
Template – the id and name of the template assigned to the ESL Templates describe what information is used and how it is shown on the screen of the device.
Password – the password of the device. If assigned the server should authenticate itself to connect to the device. It is not used in the demo version.
Advertisement period – In order to save the battery devices sleep most of the time. Periodically they wake up and inform the system. If there is some pending image to be sent to the device, the system creates a connection and sends the image. Advertisement period defines the sleep time in seconds. Increasing this period increases the battery life. Decreasing this period allows for faster updates but worsens the battery life too.
Click the button on the right side of product property. The product selection window will be shown. The current product for the device will be selected too:
Select any other desired product and press the Select button. The selected product id and name will be shown in the product property.
To select the template click the button at the right side of the template property. The template selection window will appear:
Select the desired template, for example the template with id 3 and press the Select button. The selected template id and name will be shown in the template property.
Click the Save button on top of property window.
The parameters will be saved and the updated device will switch to the Queued state:
By clicking the Pending button in the device property window it is possible to see what image is scheduled for sending to the device. As soon as the device wakes up, the system creates a connection to it and sends the image. The device screen will be updated. Pending image will be moved to the Current one. By clicking the Current button you can see the image which is shown on the device screen now.
Sometimes radio conditions may become worse and connection can drop. The reason can be weak radio signal if the device is far from the RBS or congestion in the 2.4GHz band due to high WiFi or Bluetooth activity of nearby devices. In this case the connection can fail. It will be shown as Failed in the device status column. To resend the information right click on the device and select Redraw Esl Image on the pop-up menu:
The system will resend the generated image to the device.
Products define what will be shown on the device screen. Although they are called products, you can use them for anything you want to display on the devices.
For the demo purposes a fresh installed software comes with several fake products. In order to add a new product:
Click on the Product item in the tab selector window. The products table will be shown:
Give a name to the product, for example type “Tomato timer” in the Name box.
Write some description in the description box. For example “A device for time management”
Type $ in the currency box.
Click icon to the right of the image box to upload some image. The file selection dialog box will open. Go to the installation directory of the application. There should be an “images” directory with some test images. Select “TomatoTimer.jpg” from it.
The system will import this image and give some id to it.
Click the View icon to see the imported image. You should see the following window:
Press Close button to close the window.
Type some price in the Price box. For example 5.99.
Type “piece” in the unit box.
Leave other boxes as is.
Click Save button at the top of the property window.
The system will create a new product and assign an id to it:
Imagine that there is a discount and the Tomato Timer product cost is 5.49$ now. In order to change the price property.
Select Tomato Timer in the Product table.
Click Edit button on the toolbar. You can also double-click the Tomato timer product in the table.
The Property Window will be available for editing.
Type 5.49 in the price box.
Click Save button.
The new price will be changed to 5.49$.
Let’s test the new product by assigning it to the previously discovered ESL device.
Select ESL tab by choosing Electronic Shelf Label item in the tab selector window.
Select the desired ESL device in the ESL table. For example,
Click the Edit icon on the toolbar or double click the ESL item in the table.
The property window will open in Edit mode. Now we are interested in the product property.
Click the icon of product property:
In the opened product list dialog select the new product you have added.
As we mentioned before, products are used for defining information to show on the device screen. Templates define how the information defined in products will be shown. Templates do this by dividing a screen into parts called frames. Templates has a canvas with size: with and height in pixels. The coordinate of the left-top pixel is (0, 0) and the coordinate of right-bottom one is (width – 1, height – 1).
Frames are rectangle areas inside the canvas. Their size and position are defined with their coordinates called: left, top, right, bottom relative to the left-top corner of the template canvas. This coordinates expressed in pixels. Besides the coordinates frames have their type. The type of frame defines what information does this frame contain. The frame types and their purpose are:
- Text frame– contains any textual information which can be shown as symbols. For example, name or price can be expressed with symbols so text frames can be used to show them.
- Image frame– shows an image on its area. If your product contains a property with an image, it can be shown with this type of frame.
- Line frame– is used to show lines.
- Rectangle frame– shows rectangle. Rectangles can be filled.
- Barcode frame– shows barcode of various type on its area.
Frames can be overlapped, so that one frame can be drawn on another. For example you can show white text frame on the black filled rectangle one.
The concept of template is illustrated as an example in the following picture:
Besides coordinates frames have other properties, such as color, content, etc. Some properties are used only with some type of frames. For example, text frames have “Font” property where image does not. In order to keep this guide simple we’ll not look at them in a detail. You can easily find their purpose after using the next step-by-step procedures.
The demo software comes with 3 predefined templates as examples:
- Default template for newly registered ESL devices
- A simple template to show only an image on the screen
- A little bit complex template with overlapped frames, showing name, barcode, price etc.
You’ve already used them in the previous steps. Let’s open and investigate some of them.
In order to see all the templates, click Template Design on the tab selector window.
You should see the following Template Design table with sample templates:
We are going to investigate the simplest template. This template shows only full-screen image taken from product properties.
Click on the template with ID 2.
Click the Edit button. You can achieve the same result by double clicking on the template with ID 2.
The template editor will replace the templates table. As we selected the simplest template the template editor does not look awesome and is almost empty:
The top of the template editor contains the properties of the template, Back and Save buttons. Besides Name and Description you can see the Width and Height properties with values 250 and 128 pixels. This means that template canvas is divided into 250 pixels numbered from 0 to 249 starting from the left and from 0 to 127 starting from the top. Frames use this coordinate system to specify their left-top and right-bottom corners. This allows express both frame position and its size.
The remaining part of the template editor is divided into following areas:
- Frame toolbar. Allows to add, delete and move frames to change their order.
- Frame list. Contains the list of the frames the template contains.
- Frame properties. Shows the properties of the selected frame in the frame list area.
- Preview area. Shows the preview of the template you’re editing currently.
At the bottom of the preview area there are Product and ESL selector. These are used to see how a real product will be shown on the real ESL screen.
Click the Image property in the frame list area. You’ll see its properties in the frame properties area.
Here we can see the properties of the Image frame. The Left and Top properties are (0, 0) and Right and Bottom properties are (249, 127). What do this mean? This means that this frame starts from very left and top corner of the template and continues to the very right and bottom corner occupying full template canvas.
The other important property is Content. You can see that the content has two fields. Top field shows from what object we want to take the image and bottom field shows what property of this object provides this image. So the image will be taken from image property of the product.
Let’s see this template in action by selecting a product and the ESL device to see how will it be shown.
Click the icon of the Product selector. You’ll see the product selection window:

Our e-ink display is B/W monochrome, so we see dithered monochrome image. But, our template was rectangle, why is this picture square? Because our device screen is 152x152 pixel square size and in order to show the image on this screen, the system again resizes (stretches or shrinks) the template canvas to fit into this size of screen. This means that the template is not tied to the particular device screen size. Any template can be shown on any ESL display. For example if you select the another ESL device with different screen size, for example 212x104 pixel blue-white-red screen, it will be shown as the following image:
Let’s create our new, own template. It will be simple but sufficient for our learning purpose.
Assume that we want to show on the device screen just name and price of the device. And assume that this is the device with square screen we previously registered and used. So we want to divide the device square screen into the two parts:
Our existing templates do not support this kind of layout, so we have to create a new one.
Click the Template on the tab selector window.
Click the New button on the toolbar.
The new, empty template with default size 100x100 will be created.
Type “My first template” on the Name field.
Leave the Description field empty.
Let’s change Width and Height setting them as 400x400 (100x100 is small a little bit).
Click the button on the frame toolbar.
The following combo box will open:
This frame will be our black background of the white product name.
Type “Name background” in the “Name” field.
This background occupies the area from left-top corner to the right-middle of the template canvas.
Enter the value of 0 in the “Left” field.
Enter the value of 0 in the “Top” field.
Enter the value of 399 (the very right coordinate) in the “Right” field.
Enter the value of the 199 in the “Bottom” field (0 – 199 is the top half of the canvas).
Leave the all other fields as is.
You’ll notice that the preview window refreshes every time you change some property.
After doing the mentioned steps the preview image should look like this:
Click the button on the frame toolbar.
Select Text Frame from the opened combo box. A new text frame will be created.
Type “Name” in the “Name” field of the frame.
This frame should be on the previous background frame overlapping it. Enter for this frame the same coordinates as for previous “Name background” frame. So the coordinates will be 0, 0, 399 and 199 for Left, Top, Right, Bottom properties consequently.
Select “White” for the Color property.
You should see white “Text” word on the black background in the preview image. The “Text” is the content of this frame. It is static. But we’d like to have the name of the product here.
Type %product.name% in the Content box.
This is a content expression. Content expressions are estimated at rendering time and give us different values depending on the expression itself. In particular this expression says, take the content from name property of the product.
Leave the default font as is for now.
Our font is too small thus we’d like to increase its size.
Enter 40 in the Font size field.
Select “Bold” for Font Type.
Leave Font stretch as is. It allows you to stretch or shrink your text horizontally.
Select “Center” for both Vertical and Horizontal Alignment fields.
Our name frame is ready.
Now it is time for Price frame.
Click the button on the frame toolbar.
Select Text Frame from the opened combo box.
Type “Price” in the “Name” field of the frame.
This frame should occupy the lower half of the template canvas. So enter the coordinates 0, 200, 399 and 399 for Left, Top, Right, Bottom properties consequently.
Select “Red” for the “Color” field.
You should see red “Text” word in the center of the bottom half of the template.
Again, we want the price of the product here so we should enter a content expression.
Type %product.price%%product.currency% in the Content box.
This expression says, take the content from price property of the product and append to it the currency property of the (same) product.
Leave the default font as is.
Enter 60 in the Font size field.
Select “Bold” for Font Type.
Leave Font stretch as is. It allows you to stretch or shrink your text horizontally.
Select “Center” for both Vertical and Horizontal Alignment fields.
We created all required frames. The preview windows should show the following image:
Click the Save button on the toolbar to save this template.
The template editor will be closed and you should see a new template in the template table:
You have just created your first template. Let’s test this template.
Double click on this template. This will open the template editor again.
Now we’ll select some product and ESL device to see how this template will be shown on device screen.
Click the button of the product selector. Select our Tomato Timer product.
The preview image should be like this:
Click button of the ESL selector and select some ESL device. For example 1.5” B/W device.
The preview window shows the image as it can be seen on the 152x152 size B/W monochrome screen:
As the B/W screen does not have red color, it showed the price in black color.
If you selected the device with 2.13 B/R/W device with 212x104 pixel size screen the preview image would look like this:
As you can see this screen has red color so it showed the red price correctly. Notice that the screen is not square and our square image stretched to fill the display.
Let’s see the template in action.
Select the Electronic Shelf Label in the tab selector window.
Double click on the first ESL item.
Click button of Template field in the property window.
Select “My first template” in the template selection window and click “Select” button.
Click Save button on top of property window.
Enjoy the result on the selected real device screen.
Congratulations!
You’ve passed successfully the getting started guide and are ready to investigate and use the system.