When Impact Explorer™ is first opened there are no keypads "on the system", you have to tell Impact Explorer™ how many and which keypads are to be used in any session. Each keypad has a reference number (which may appear on the label on the keypad). The Keypad menu, Search for keypads item or the icon on the toolbar can be used to search for active keypads.
Once Impact Explorer™ is searching for keypads, each participant should be asked to press the 1 (one) key on their keypad. In fact, users can press any key on the keypad except the Clear key (if present), but giving a clear instruction to press the 1 (one) key, removes any doubt as to which key users should press. When a key has been pressed the system will then detect which keypads are active (in use) for the session. A red number will appear in a small window display on the keypad. After a few seconds the red number will disappear and the keypad number will be shown on the list. (You may prefer to do all of this yourself prior to the workshop - this depends on the style you are adopting.)
The Keypad activation dialog shows which keypads are active. If the "show inactive keypads" box is checked in the keypad activation dialog then a list of all possible keypads, from 1 to 250, will appear. The active keypads will be shown in bold black type, while the inactive keypads will be less distinct. You can change the status of keypads by selecting them (you can select more than one) and then clicking the Activate or Deactivate buttons.
Impact Explorer™ remembers the last set of keypads that were in use, so if the same set is to be used, perhaps as part of a continuation of a workshop, you can click the Use last set button to quickly restart a workshop.
Also on this dialog you can select to use the demonstration mode where the system emulates 50 users, with one of them being a visual representation of a keypad. This can be useful for demonstrating to an audience how the software works.
Once the keypads have been detected the system is ready for use.
If no keypads are shown as active in the keypad activation dialog, please see Troubleshooting.
The software will automatically optimise the speed of data gathering during the keypad detection phase. The maximum time that gathering inputs takes is 5 seconds. If there are less than the full 250 keypads, this can be reduced to as low as 1 second (if the keypads are all numbered in the range 1 through 50).
See also Activating keypads.