Posts under ‘Technical Articles’

Microphonics™ isn’t a word is it?  It is now!
As those of you who know me will be aware I am a big fan of Automation. The use of sensors in control systems is the clever and progressive way forward.
Putting light switches when they are not the best solution is a waste of money, time and [...]

DMX as a standard was developed for the entertainment industry and has been adopted for use in large architectural projects over the last few years.
Lot of articles on the internet cover the electronic details of what DMX is which is of interest to those wishing to create products that send or receive and wish to [...]

Energy saving light bulbs have taken over the world in the last couple of years so much so that later this year (2009) the major retailers in the UK plan to remove filament light bulbs from there shelves.
However in most projects with lighting controls low energy light bulbs are not to be found. In fact [...]

The recent introduction of the 17th edition regulations means a number of changes in the protection of circuits.
Mode Lighting units such as the tiger and Evolution have no main isolator and hence even in the previous edition of the regulations a mechanical isolator was required to isolate the incoming power to the unit to carry [...]

A recent project meant i had to explain a RS232 integration to non technical users.
RS232 is a very simple way of communicating between two systems.
You can think of it as a simple speech communication a good example being the exchanges of speech that go on in a parliment or any sort of debate.
Members of parliment [...]

Automation is great and sales people sell lighting control systems based on the ability to automate tasks.
But as anyone who sets a daily alarm knows automation is not great when the alarm wakes you up on a Saturday morning instead of allowing you your well deserved lie in!
This is a very simple example of how [...]

A recent project highlighted the common mistakes made when  wiring   1-10v DC analogue control.
When wiring for DMX or Dali there is a widely accepted standard which can be followed but with 1-10v control there is no such standard I guess the thought is always but it’s so simple how can it go wrong!
The Basics:
Electronic ballasts [...]

Aims
This short document aims to present the common control standard used in the lighting industry today and give a short explanation of their development, uses, advantages and disadvantages.

Introduction:

Lighting can be switched on or of and it can be dimmed that is the light output of the lighting source varied to different [...]

I visit many very expensive developments programming lighting controls. When we are just contracted to do the programming we arrive on site after all the first fixing has been completed and sometimes even later than that at a very late stage when the project is near to completion.

You can understand control panels for a [...]