This is one of a series of posts describing the new features in Carousel 5.2 which will be entering Beta testing very soon. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series so far:

• Bulletin Impression Tracking

Problem: You’re all set to launch your new digital signage system, when you discover that, for some reason, your player isn’t (pick one):

• Displaying bulletins
• Contacting the server
• Showing you a list of channels
• Other strange behavior

Solution: No clue… Call Tightrope???

In Carousel 5.2, there’s a much better way to diagnose strange communication issues between your Carousel Players and the Carousel server. Let me give you a first look at the DisplayEngine’s new advanced communication test suite.

Here’s the new DisplayEngine configuration screen, which you can access by clicking the “Configure” button when the DisplayEngine is starting up.

Notice in the top left section, the server field and the green checkmark button. To run the diagnostics enter the address of your Carousel server and click the checkmark button. If all tests are successful, you’ll see the following test results screen:

You’ll find a list of each test that was performed, plus a green check for each test that passes. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll find a short description of the test results. In this case, all of our tests succeeded, so we should have no problems with our Carousel system.

Great. Perfect. So what? What about if something goes wrong? Well, to simulate a common connection problem, I went in and forcibly shut down the Carousel Service, a critical piece of software that runs on the Carousel server. Without the Carousel Service, your players won’t get any new content. Definitely not a situation you’d like to be in.

So what happens? I’ll re-run the tests:

Ah ha! Some of the tests failed! You can see that this DisplayEngine wasn’t able to connect to the Carousel server. And if you read the test results at the bottom, you’ll see several possible reasons for why the test failed, and some possible solutions you can try to get it passing. I’ve highlighted the “Carousel Service has not been started” section because that’s the exact cause of our failure. As soon as I started the service back up, all the tests passed once again.

Here’s the list of tests that are performed:

• Pings the server address that you’ve entered, to make sure that a computer is on the network that responds to that address
• Connects to a Carousel Service running on that address
• Downloads some data from the Carousel Service
• Downloads some data from the Carousel Web Server
• Checks the time on the server and compares it to the Player’s system time (If these times are too far apart, bulletins might not appear on screen as you’d expect)
• Checks the Carousel software versions on both the Server and Player, looking for a version mismatch.

Quite a lot of work for a single button.

We hope this new feature of the DisplayEngine helps cure some headaches when troubleshooting connection issues.