Swarms, keys & sites

A handful of words carry most of the meaning in YBeeM swarm. Learn what a swarm, a cloud key, a site, and a video wall are, and how the four fit together, and the rest of the dashboard reads naturally.

The swarm

A swarm is a set of kiosks that share one cloud key and cooperate as a unit. Most often they cooperate to render one combined image across many screens, so a row of displays behaves like a single large one, but a swarm is simply your grouping: it is the thing you name, licence, lay out, and manage together.

Every kiosk in a swarm reports in live, so the dashboard shows you the whole group at a glance with an online status for each screen. You can have as many swarms as you have sites; each one is independent, with its own key and its own fleet.

The cloud key

A cloud key is the single most important object in the product, because it plays two roles at once:

• It is the swarm's licence — your subscription is scoped to it.
• It is the credential every unit in that swarm uses to reach the hosted cloud.

A key is a two-part string, a public id joined to a secret:

{key_id}.{secret}
   |         |
   |         +-- the secret half; shown once, never recoverable
   +-- the public id for this swarm

You mint a key in the dashboard, we show you the full string exactly once, and you paste it into each unit of that site. The cloud only ever stores a one-way hash of the secret half, so even we cannot read your key back to you — keep the copy you were shown somewhere safe.

Scope and revocation

A cloud key only ever reaches its own swarm. A unit holding one site's key can talk to that site and nothing else — it can never see another site's fleet, config, or updates. This is what lets you hand a key to an installer without handing over the rest of your estate.

Because the key is the access, taking it away is instant. Revoke a key from the dashboard and that site is cut off immediately: its units can no longer reach the cloud, and its subscription stops. There is nothing to un-deploy on the devices.

Sites & floorplans

A site is a place with a floorplan — an image of the building or room where your screens physically stand. You upload the floorplan once, then drag kiosks from a tray onto it to mirror the real layout.

Placements are stored proportionally, so a pin holds its spot whatever size the plan is drawn at. The result is a live map: you can see at a glance which screen is which, and which are online, without walking the floor. Full detail is on the floorplans page.

Video walls

A video wall is a rows × cols layout laid over a swarm. You set the grid size and drag each kiosk into a cell; every unit then owns one tile of the grid and renders just its slice of the one combined image.

Where a floorplan records where a screen is, a video wall records what part of the picture it shows. The two are independent: the same swarm can be pinned on a floorplan and arranged into a wall at the same time. The video walls page walks through building one.

How it fits together

Four terms, four jobs:

In short: a swarm is your group of screens, a cloud key licences and admits it, a floorplan maps it, and a video wall composes it into one picture.

Where to go next

With the vocabulary in hand, pick up the task you're on:

• Mint and manage keys, and adopt units, from your dashboard.
• Compose your screens into one image on the video walls page.
• Map your estate on the floorplans page.
• Understand key scope, revocation, and how units are admitted on the security page.