 In this video, I'm going to show you how to use your stream deck to toggle on your Nanlite, Pavotubes, or any other Nanlites for that matter. Hello, and welcome to Take One Tech, and my name's Alec, and in this video I'm going to be taking you on a little bit of a journey of automation, because there isn't a direct link as far as I know between stream deck and Nanlite, but there is a way that you can do it. And it's not actually that tricky, it's just a few different steps that you've got to follow. So hopefully I shall be laying all of that out in a very clear and easy to understand manner, hopefully easier to understand than it is to say. But what am I talking about? Well, in my case, it is these Nanlite Pavotubes 6C's, the ones that I've got at the back that are illuminating the wall to give me the color on the otherwise gray wall behind me. I did do a video all about these, which I'll leave in the top corner, where I explain the, well I'll do a bit of an unboxing, an unboxing of a re-boxed light. But then I also explained the upgrade process to upgrade the firmware and how to get those working with the Nanlink app, which I'll be coming onto in a moment. Now Nanlite do actually make a number of different lights, so not just these ones. And I will be getting around to replacing the other lights in my studio, so my key lights and, well it's not really a hairlight, but you can get the point. So let's have a little look at some of the other lights that they've got. As well as the RGB tubes, so I've got the Pavotubes 6C's, which are around about 30 centimeters, 12 inches long, but then there is some other length ones of those as well. Who knows, maybe I'll upgrade some of those at some point. But these are the ones that I'll be looking at, something like this, the 60B or something for my key light at the front on either side of me. So there is quite a range of professional grade lights, and with these you wouldn't need to worry so much about the colors or anything like that that you've got going on. So that is a little bit about Nanlite, and as I say, there is an app that you can use to control them that is for the mobile that you can get on iOS. And I believe Android, and that is called the Nanlink app. So let's have a quick look at that. And this is the Nanlink app. I did talk about this at length on the other video I did. So it enables you to go in, set up different scenes rather, can't speak today. Pick different colors and things like that. Make any adjustments that you want to do and basically control all of the controls that you've got on the lights themselves. You've then got those on the mobile app. So that's fine. The issue that I had with the mobile app was it works over Bluetooth. And I found that sometimes the connection wasn't so stable. It was once it was connected, it was fine. But then if I went out somewhere with my phone and then came back to the studio, sometimes the connection wouldn't immediately connect or you'd have to press the thing to reconnect. And so it just wasn't there that I could just easily go with a push of a button, just get them on, which is ultimately what I was after. So I thought, well, there must be another way. Well, fortunately in Monterey and onwards in Mac OS, we can now run iOS apps on the Mac OS desktop itself. And so in fact, that little snapshot that I showed you there, that's actually rather than the iOS app store, that's actually the Mac app store. And so you can just get the NanLink app, just search for NanLink. I'll obviously leave a link in the description, but you can just download it from there. Now it does say design for iPhone and also not verified for Mac OS, but I can tell you, I have verified it, it does work. So it does certainly do what it's intended to do. One thing you will have to do though is we're at installation, it will prompt you to go to your system preferences, go to your security and privacy section. And then in here, you'll need to go to your Bluetooth section. And then from there, you'll need to come down and just make sure the NanLink app does have access to your Bluetooth, because as I say, it is controlled over Bluetooth. From there, you basically go through exactly the same setup process as I covered in that previous video. So going in and adding lights and fixtures. And what you'll then have is you'll have something that looks a little bit like this. So here, if I just drag it up where you can see it, that might be helpful. Get that one out of the way. This is basically the NanLink app. And here, basically, I've got my two lights, pavo left, pavo right, very originally named. And here, if I just click on this little symbol here, then it will toggle the light off. So now you can see the light behind me is gone off. And then now the other one has gone off. Both lights are now off. You can see the little strike through the light bulb icon. And now if I toggle them both back on, whoops, it's Daisy. And then toggle that one back on, they've both come back on again. So that is basically how this app works. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to be creating lots of different scenes for different lighting conditions and things like that. I literally just want to be able to come in. And when I want to start recording, I can just basically press a button and have them both come on. So when these are switched off, basically the lights themselves are still technically on. They're plugged into a power supply. And so the little screen is on. It's just that the brightness is then set to zero. So there's no actual light coming out of them. So I will be leaving the lights on all the time. It's just that I'm then going to be able to toggle the actual light on and off, if that makes sense. I'm probably making a bit too much of an explanation after that. But anyway, I'll move on. So that is basically how the Nanolink app works. So the way that I figured that I would do this and actually automate this is using one of my favorites, of course, keyboard maestro. So what I'm going to do is talk you through the steps involved to automate this process in keyboard maestro. And then once we've done that, it's just another short step to then add in the stream deck integration so that I can do it with the push of a button. I've done a whole series of videos about keyboard maestro, so I'm not going to go over everything in keyboard maestro or a full introduction of it. So I'll leave a link to some of my keyboard maestro stuff just up above my head. But what I'll do here is I'll just start from fresh with this macro and I'll talk you through all of the steps that I've done to actually create this. So here we go at the bottom. I'm going to click on the little plus icon to create a new macro. I'm going to give it a name and I'm just going to call it Nanlink. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to start adding in some actions. I'm not going to add any triggers because I'm actually going to trigger this with stream deck. The first action that I want to do, in fact, let me just pull this Nanlink app down here so that we can see it next to it. The first thing I want to do is actually just basically open up or activate the Nanlink app. And that is done using the command activate. So if I come here and type in activate, you'll see we've got activate a specific application. What that does is if the program is not open, it will open it. If it is open, then it will just make it the frontmost active application. So I'm going to click on that one, double click rather, and it will bring it down here. And then I get the option to choose which application I want to activate. Now I want to activate the Nanlink app. And normally if you have a look here, you can see a list of active applications. And if I was to click in here, then I would see the list and I'd just go down to pick out Nanlink. I'm not sure why, but maybe it's something to do with this being an iOS app running on the Mac. But instead of Nanlink, it actually says Nanlink and then it says translocated location or something like that. Translocated with a little explanation mark. So what I've done instead, just in case that is an issue, is instead I've gone down to other and I've actually picked out the application itself from the finder. So if I type in here Nanlink, there is the app. So as I say, I'm not entirely sure that that's totally necessary, but I just wanted to be sure it was activating the correct application. Now if the application was open but minimized in the finder, or sorry, in the dock I should say, then this wouldn't necessarily actually open the window up so that the window appears here. So what we do want to do is just make sure we check this one here that says reopen initial windows. And by checking on that, then if I minimize this window now and then I click on the run button at the top, it's basically going to bring it to the front and also make sure it's up on the screen. So that's the first step. Now what we want to do is we want to actually simulate the clicking of these two icons here. And the way that I'm going to do that, you can actually in keyboard maestro have it find a specific image on the screen and go and click that, which is very useful if you're doing things like logging into a particular website, you want to click on an icon, click on a button or something like that. But because we've got the same icon twice, what I'm actually going to do is I want to click on a specific location on the screen instead. So the way that I will do that is come down here and click on new action. And then from here, we want to basically simulate a mouse click. So if I type in mouse, you can see that we've got this one here, move or click mouse. Double click on that one to add it into our macro. Now here, you can basically, you could add modifier keys if you want. So if you need to do stuff like option click or command click, then you have the option to do that. We don't need any of that. You also have the option to do things like either click, double click, just move the mouse to a particular place or click and release, triple click, things like that. We just want to click, obviously. The next one you've got is also the left button, but you could also change that to be the right button, center button. If you've got multiple buttons, you can do that as well. So you can get really technical with this if you've got lots of different complex commands that you want to do with mouse clicks. If you want to simulate a particular workflow you've got. But we're going to stay simple and all we want to do is literally just come over here and click on this icon. Now, what we can do is we can define the exact position that we want to click. And you can do this in a number of ways. You can either do it relative to the front window, which is what we want to do because we've made this nanolink app now the front window. So we want to click on a position relative to a corner of that window. This will hopefully make sense in a moment. In fact, let me just go and do this one first and then I'll explain the other options for clicking because we do actually want to do this one. We want to click basically on a position relative to this top corner of the window. Why do we want to do that? Well, because if we had moved this window somewhere else previously and then we minimized it and then it got maximized as part of this or rather opened up again, then we would want to make sure we were still clicking on the correct place relative to the corner rather than just the same place on the screen, which might then not have the app in it. Hope that makes sense. So the way that we actually record the position, you can see here that we've actually got a point from relative to the left-hand side and also relative to the top. So the way that we actually get that, rather than getting our little pixel measure out and measuring how many pixels it is across and down, all we do is we just click on this get button here. There's a bit of a countdown and if I come over here and just make sure I'm clicking in the right place, it will just record that position. So it's now recorded where my mouse was and it's recorded it relative to the top left corner of this window. So it was 214 pixels from the left and 129 pixels from the top. So that is basically it. So if I was to run this now, you'll see that it is basically just toggling that one light on and off. So now all we need to do is repeat that for the other one. So what I'm going to do here is I'm actually just going to duplicate. So this is a quick way to do this. If you've got something in action already, you can just duplicate it. I will just mention the other ways. I mentioned you could actually do it relative to other things. So we've got the front windows top left corner, but you can do it relative to any other corner. You can also do it relative to the front window center. You can also do it in the same way relative to the main screen. So if you've got a 1920 by 1080 display, you can do it relative to the top corner or bottom corner, whichever one you wanted, or relative to the center of the screen. You can also do it relative to a specific image. So keyboard maestro can actually look for a particular image on the on the screen. And then you can do it relative to that as well. So again, if you've got something that's related to a particular logo or graphic and you need to click somewhere relative to that, then you can do that as well. But we do just want it relative to the top corner of that particular window. So all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to click on this one again because I need to update this position with the new position. This time for the second light. So if I click on here, I'll just make sure I'm clicking in the right place. And that is now recorded that position. So we've got this one 214 from the left and 129 from the top. This one is happens to be 210 from the left and 184 from the top. So this now, if I run this, you should see that in fact I need to just turn this one off. Otherwise one will go on, one will go off. So both lights are now off. And if I click on the little run command at the top, then you can see that it's gone and switched them both on. And you will have also noticed that my mouse just kind of miraculously moved over to that side as well. So if I come back to run and do that again, you'll notice that the mouse just appears over in the other position. And now both of the lights are off. One last thing that I wanted to do was I did want to actually just minimize this after it opened it up so that if it was minimized in the dock, it wouldn't just remain on the screen. So all I did here was I actually run a specific command. So here I did the minimize from the Nanolink window menu. There are other ways of doing this, but this is the way that I did it. So the way that I did it was a new action and this is a menu command. So we basically want to activate a specific menu. So show or select menu item. And then the menu item I wanted was if I come down to menu, you can basically just go down to find the application Nanolink, go to the window and then minimize. So now that is going to minimize it. One thing I also did was just in case there is a slight delay required, I actually added a little bit of a pause in between these two. So the way I did that was came up here and typed in pause and then drag that in and just figured that half a second would be more than enough and yet not really noticeable for me. So now when I press the run command up here, what you'll see is that this now actually toggles the lights in this case back on and then the window just minimizes. So now we've got the window minimized and if I run it again, you'll see that the window opens up, the lights go off and then it disappears again. So that is basically how we set up the keyboard maestro command. So let's just switch the lights back on, shall we? And then what I'll do now is I'll show you how to actually assign this to Stream Deck. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up my Stream Deck window or Stream Deck app, I should say. And there is the icon that I've already created, but I'm going to do it again for you just here. In order to do this, the best plugin to use to my mind is not actually the built-in keyboard maestro plugin for Stream Deck, but rather one called KM Link. And to get that, just click up here on the Stream Deck store, this little button just up at the top, come into the Stream Deck store, come into plugins, and then just search for KM Link or one word. Whoops, if I can spell it right. And this is it. It's for executing keyboard maestro macros. You'll find that then on this right-hand side of all the macros. It doesn't actually come in its own folder in the same way that you do for other things like Zoom or PowerPoint or things like that. It basically comes in this one custom because there is only one command for it. So you just come down here and then you've got this one KM Link. And then this is really easy to use. All you do is you just come and select the name of the macro and hopefully when you've just set up a keyboard maestro macro, it will tell you here the last modified macro and what the name of it was. So in this case, it's this Nanolink one. And so now when I press that button, that will then activate that macro, which is toggling the lights on and off. And so that is how you can then control your Nanolink lights with keyboard maestro and Stream Deck. So as I said at the beginning, a little bit of a workaround, but once it's set up, I now don't need to worry about it. And when I come in, I can just press this button, my lights come on and go off as I need them. I hope you have found that useful. If you did, then as ever, don't forget to like and subscribe. And as always, you can always head over to my Buy Me A Coffee page to support the channel either on a one-off or ongoing basis as well. So that's all for this video, but I will leave a link to some more of my Stream Deck videos over on the right hand side for those that are interested. So stick around, plenty more coming up.