The heart of the commercial district is home to a ten story parking garage, and a more pedestrian looking structure would have been hard to imagine before it got its recent face lift. Since Mid-October, however, it's a beacon of vibrant energy and a show-piece that may increase tourism, besides. The reason for this transformation is a story that not only relates to current trends in lighting, but future ones as well.
As you can see in the YouTube videos offered here, this lot is not a mundane municipal parking facility anymore. With the help of almost 1500 DMX controlled weatherproof LED fixtures by Space Cannon Australia, it plays a dual role as art-form and practical structure. What is the technology behind this new facade? One part of it is DMX over Ethernet, and the other is RDM. When it came time for installation, the RDM capability of the fixtures was a deal-maker. It took the closure of busy city streets and use of a large crane to install the almost 750 panels (two LED fixtures per 1m x 1m brushed aluminium panel.) They were hung on pre-rigged frames to speed the process up, but the electrical contractors really needed to expedite this process and knew that getting back later for troubleshooting purposes during commissioning was out of the question. So they used a fixture that was factory-sealed for environmental suitability, with no buttons or dip-switches on it that could let in moisture. The arrangement was not inflexible or complicated to plan, however, because the fixtures could be addressed remotely using RDM.
Its content is provided by s design studio who are under contract to keep fresh material regularly. They are using Green Hippo's Hippotizer to serve the media up, but the signal distribution is all about Enttec gear. We provided a Datagate DE (8 universes of Art-Net to DMX conversion) and two ODE single universe nodes.
Our work on Remote Device Management was pivotal in the development of the LED fixture used. Under contract to Space Cannon Australia, Enttec helped with implementing RDM for their fixtures, thus speeding their time to market and assuring that they would be in compliance with the standard (most other manufacturers developing or selling RDM fixtures have relied on our RDM Sniffer and RDM Controller programs and RDM USB Pro hardware, so they knew they were in good company.)
Using an Enttec e-Streamer to record & playback most of the shows made it much easier for the entire set-up to be configured.
After the frames were hung and all the fixtures were powered, it took 2 workers, an a walkie-talkie just a few hours to tap their way through all 1500 fixtures and assign their DMX starting addresses, using a laptop and our RDM Controller application. This convenience was one of the ways in which RDM made this project possible.
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