I searched this forum and couldn't find any info; forgive me if I missed it.
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We have used audio levels to trigger camera presets many times. Of course, discreet mics work pretty well for this, ceiling mics not so well. The Shure MXA mics seem to have the potential to make this simple, but I haven't found the secret yet. Viewing the lobes in Shure Designer, I can see that the correct/expected lobe is activated immediately - it appears to be flawless. But Shure's command strings don't offer a simple Get Beam Activated. Instead, they offer "Get X-Axis Beam Steering, Get Y-Axis, and Get Beam Height (Z-Axis), all measured in centimeters from the mic. I don't need, and can't use, this extreme level of detail and the resultant flood of signals to parse. Extron offers a way to pre-define a 3-dimensional cube by defining the X, Y, and Z coordinates of its imaginary diagonal corners in a space, and then notify me when the X, Y, Z coordinates being reported fall within a defined cube. This is a tedious and sometimes confusing process, but it seems to work. However, even then, I only get a notice that a zone has been activated; it does not report that the activation has ceased - which is a critical piece of information.
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It seems to me, though, that this requires me to re-invent the wheel, when that parsing and comparing of data points is clearly already happening within either the mic itself or the Shure Designer software, because I see the lobes firing (or highlighting) accurately in the software. It seems that when I drag a lobe to a specific coverage area, that is graphically defining the 3-dimensional space, and Shure is already calculating which lobe a given audio source falls in. Why not simply make that info available via command string? i.e. is a lobe active?... which one?
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Will someone please show me what a dolt I am, or possibly point me to a module or other useful solution?
