Surface – Bitfocus AS

Adopting a surface

When you click on Connect and then Surface in the menu bar, the window shown above opens. Initially, this window displays the surfaces available on the network you are connected to. It provides details about the surface type, IP address, port number, and serial number.

If you click on one of the surfaces, the context menu shown above will appear. For now, let’s click on Adopt.

You should also notice the small + Badge in front of the surface, indicating that the surface is newly been discovered on the network.

Click the newly adopted surface to open the Surface Config settings. Here, you can:

Change the label of the surface.
Reset the Serial Number of the Stream Deck.
Change the IP and Port of the surface.
Add tags.
Assign or remove the surface on a position.
Check Type of surface and Firmware version.
Adjust the panel brightness.
Reboot the surface.
Use the Identify function to flash a button on the physical surface, making it easier to locate.
Adjust the Viewing Angle of the Stream Deck Studio.
You can also see the related surfaces of the Surface you are configuring, In this example the Stream Deck Neo is connected to the Front USB of the Stream Deck Studio.
Delete any surfaces you no longer want to control in Buttons.

Remember to click Save when you are done.

Adopting multiple surfaces

You can also adopt multiple surfaces at the same time.

Assign a surface to a Position

The Assign Position Dropdown button shows that the device is adopted into Buttons, but is not currently assigned to any Position.

If you click on the indicator, a context menu appears where you can either:

Create Position
Create a position, and navigate to it
Assign the surface to an existing Position, depending on your configuration.
In this setup, we already have a few positions configured.

View options

At the top of the window there are a few buttons.

The 8/10 Numbers shows us that we currently have 8 of the 10 surfaces that our license allows for, active in our configuration.

The first button will turn on the Log View, making it easier to debug any connection issues

The Second button will Minimize/Maximize the information in the surface list, giving you more detail or more space.

The third button will turn on or off IP address display for the surface list.

And the forth button gives you options to group surfaces by tags, making it easier to organize large systems.

Manually adding a surface

You can also click on the blue +Add button to manually set up a surface.

This opens the Create Surface selection dialog box. Let’s select an iPad Mini.

iPad as a surface

Next, give it a name and click Create Surface.

This brings up the Surface Config page for the iPad Surface you just created. To view it, click the green

button. This will open an iPad view in your browser, which can be used as a surface.

To bring this view to an actual iPad, replace the `localhost` with the IP address of the machine running Buttons. For example: http://192.168.0.252:3000/ipad/k4tbgtkp3adqhtapemw6npos

In this case:

192.168.0.252 is the IP address of the machine.
The final part of the URL k4tbgtkp3adqhtapemw6npos is the unique ID of the Surface.
If you are working from another machine than the server running Buttons, the QR code will show the correct address to the server.

Custom Surface

We can also add a custom surface which will turn any touch-screen with a compatible browser in to a Buttons surface.

Notice that the config gives you the resolution at the bottom so that you can experiment your way with the different values to perfectly fit the intended surface.

The way to connect a custom surface to the Buttons setup is the same as for an iPad. You can also edit the setup after it's created in the config window.

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