Recognized as one of the most advanced art lighting systems in Europe, the $900,000 installation, done by Thorn Outdoor Lighting, turns Stoke's Civic Centre into a giant 300ft by 75ft canvas for colourful light shows each night, designed by students, as featured in January's issue of L&SI.To facilitate the demanding requirements of the installation, Thorn chose W-DMX IP65 units for wireless control of the entire system.
The building is illuminated by 57 groups of DMX-controlled, Thorn RGB LED strips (more than 100 fixtures in total) fixed to the building. These combine with colour changing floodlights uplighting from the front. On the adjacent street, banners hang from streetlamps also lit by LED strips on both sides. The installation required two entire universes of wireless DMX.
32 units of W-DMX R-512 outdoor receivers, a W-DMX BB-500 Booster and 2 W-DMX RP-512 Repeaters were used to cover the area of the city centre and give wireless control to over 3,000 feet non-line of sight from control point to fixture-banks.
Nearby buildings block the line of the radio signal to the streetlight banners, and a harsh radio environment exists. Niclas Arvidsson of Wireless Solution says: "Because the transmitter had to be positioned on the front façade of the Civic Centre, some of the streetlights are not actually in its sightline. We solved this with a Wireless Solutions W-DMX Repeater, which receives the radio signal from the transmitter and uses advanced signal processing before re-transmitting it, making it ideal as a 'corner bender'."
As for the concern over interference, W-DMX avoids that by operating in a different set of frequencies, using adaptive FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) and TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technologies, which were originally invented by the US military to adapt wireless data signals to the local RF environment.
The 8-month installation was completed by Southern Electric Contracting. SEC's project manager Paul Carolan said: "We have been particularly impressed with the wireless DMX system (W-DMX) from Wireless Solutions as it has cut out all of the civil work and massively reduced any major disruption to the area; this makes the whole exercise extremely cost-effective."
Phil Hopkins of Thorn Outdoor Lighting attended the award ceremony and was pleased to share the news with everyone involved. "Stoke City Council in particular is pleased and proud to have received this award and Malcolm Dawson sends his personal thanks to all concerned at Thorn and its sub contractors for all of the tremendous effort you have put in. I too would like to add my congratulations to everybody involved in the project. I feel sure that this is only the first of many awards this project will receive."
(Chris Henry)
