Saudi Arabia - Luminex kicked off the festival season at the inaugural edition of A Thousand and One, Riyadh’s newest large-scale music festival.
Across five distinct stages, Qafilah, Sahaab, Bizar Bazar, Bustan, and Qasr, the festival hosted both world-class DJs and rising stars. Colour Sound Experiment provided complete lighting, video, and control solutions for all stages, backed by robust and intelligent networking infrastructure.
Each stage relies on a dependable network backbone built around Luminex GigaCore switches. Every stage has multiple racks: FOH, stage left, stage right – all connected via GigaCore switches’ ISL ports. Using Luminex’s RLinkX feature, the team created a redundant ring network with ultra-fast recovery, ensuring automatic fallback in case of link failure.
Each stage was routed to a dedicated backup cabin located hundreds of metres away. These cabins housed all backup lighting and video consoles, maintaining complete redundancy and operational continuity throughout the festival.
Desert temperatures can be brutal, but so is GigaCore’s resilience. Leveraging the Luminex API (available for LumiNode and GigaCore), the deployment was not only automated but also featured real-time thermal monitoring of all switches. This ensured optimal performance and peace of mind in the most demanding conditions.
“As expected, the Luminex GigaCore switches were able to provide solid performance, despite the extreme temperatures that we were faced with,” says Aramus Raynier, network and systems architect.
LumiNode was also an essential part of the system, offering powerful tools for DMX, Art-Net, and sACN conversion, merging and distribution. LumiNode, with its innovative processing architecture, allows multiple protocol conversions to run in parallel, ensuring unique flexibility and scalability.
To oversee the entire infrastructure, Araneo was used in combination with the MA-Net3 licence. Araneo provided a clear graphical overview of the AV network, monitoring all data flows and MA-Net3 sessions in real time, helping the crew maintain full control and visibility.
