Studiocode Tutorials | 6.5 Labels & Groups - Activation Links and Labels

Transcript

In this tutorial we're going to talk about activation links and how they behave in relation to labels.

So you can see in my code window that I have a code button called taxi it's a to click button with a lead time of 4. Then I have some labels north south west east and turn and straight so let's just watch the video for a moment. Here let me just point out that you might be able to see this taxi on the right side which is about to enter the intersection and for my purposes it's entering the intersection from the south so you know in terms of watching the video I would right now I could click on taxi and I could click on south and straight presuming you know it's going to go straight through the intersection but I can almost in this situation make all of those observations at once so this is a good situation to take advantage of activation links.

So I'm going to rewind the video here and I'm in edit mode and if i click on north you can see that the links are presented down here. We're going to talk about the activation link so again I'm on the North label when I click on the activation link menu I get this drop-down menu and it's just a list of all the codes and labels in the window.

You can see as I drag up and down on the menu the little arrow sort of hops and skips around to let you know which button you want to link to. So my thought process now is a you know when the taxis in the intersection right away I can identify that it's coming from this north south east or west so I'll go ahead and link each of these labels for the directions to taxi because when I click on one of those labels it will then automatically activate taxi for me.

So let's go ahead and do that. I'm on north and I want to just drag to taxi. I'll click on South go back to the menu taxi I'll go to West click on the menu. Here's a little trick if I press T for taxi will just jump there then I can press return and last one T for taxi return.

So let's just take a look at that first of all if I go back to code mode now because I have these activation links I'll just pause the video here you can see the taxi just went through there's a lead time of four seconds so if I click on North or let's say South it's coming from the south you can see I clicked on South because I have this link it automatically turned on taxi for me which actually marked in four seconds earlier and because the taxi is now exiting I can just actually click on this taxi button to mark out.

So that saved me a click by adding this activation link. Right I could just click on South instead of taxi first South second and then taxi again to mark out so that's sort of one level of activation link and we might also you know be able to observe like we said earlier whether the vehicles going straight or making a turn through the intersection.

So why don't we take advantage of activation links as well by going to a second level. So you can see that I'm on turn and in this case you know we already know that this is coming from the south but what if it's coming from the any of the I any of the other directions I want to be able to use turn and straight for all of those so the easiest thing to do is actually in this situation going to lasso these labels command C to copy click back in the white area command V to paste and I can repeat that process to add these labels.

So I'm taking advantage of duplicate labels which yes uses up a little more real estate in the code window but because of the activation links is going to save me additional clicks. So you probably know where I'm going with this. I'll click on this turn activation will go to this oh there's a good point to take advantage of is I just typed n and then returned because I assumed it was going to link to this North button I actually have another North button further down so one way to remove this link is if I go back to turn I could just go here and select the same button and it'll remove it um and let's add it to the proper North button there alright.

So I'll go ahead and finish this process. Okay so I finished adding the links here and let me just demonstrate that if I'd remove this second label around you can see there's actually two links there just looks like one since they're lined up right on top of each other. Okay so now that I have both of those labels linked actively let's say to this directionality label and then that in turn is activating taxi. I can now go to code mode and let's fast forward and find another taxi actually coming through the intersection here's one again it's coming from the south so right away remember I have a four second lead time on taxi so I'll actually let the taxi gets through the intersection and I can again see that it's coming from the south and going straight so I can just click on straight that activates south which activates taxi and now I can end taxi.

So again you can see it saves me a few clicks and over a large volume the video that's going to save me a lot of time. One other important point to make at this point is you might be thinking that if let me go fast-forward away from this instance let's just imagine there's a taxi coming through again. You might be thinking that because this these links exist if I click on let's say turn which turns at which activates south and turns on taxi that I could click on turn again which would activate south and turn off taxi but that's why these links are called activation links it only activates it doesn't deactivate and as you might expect you will learn how a deactivation link works in another video tutorial so the point is you still need to end the code button independently.