National Portrait Gallery during the refurbishment works

I have been working over the last couple of months on the Lighting Control systems for the National Portrait Galleries in Edinburgh.

The refurbishment of this classic red sandstone  building originally designed by Robert Rowand has been going on for some months and with the recent opening of the National Museum of Scotland Edinburgh really is spoiled with fantastic galleries to visit for free!

The gallery re-opens to the public this coming November.

Tech Blurb:

This large project is a mix of Evolution and the new Mode Edin units used to provide a wireless interface allowing users to setup galleries locally.

The spectacular roof of the new visitor centre moving into place!

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a project at Rosslyn Chapel just outside Edinburgh.

Rossyln a 15th-century medieval Midlothian chapel was featured in Dan Brown’s 2003 novel “The Da Vinci Code” and ever since the annual visitor numbers have rocketed!

The current refurbishment includes creation of a purpose built visitor centre and an upgrade to the lighting within the Chapel.

On this project I have been working for Mode Lighting the Lighting Controls manufacturer and alongside Arthur Mckay the electrical contractors and Gavin Fraser of FotoMA who has completed the lighting design.

Tech Blurb:

The evolution lighting controls system in Rosslyn Chapel controls a number of different types of lighting including LED, Fluorescent and Metal Halide Lighting.  The Control system has redundancy built in with system shutdown in the chapel or visitor center not affecting the other. In addition a Mode Lighting Relay Pack controls the small mains power for all audio visual systems along with a communication to the AV control systems giving the staff a single point of control for all systems.  The system has a number of control plates including the evolution LCD plate which gives text feedback to users and simple key switch control for non-technical users.

I recently completed programming and GUI design for a tandberg video conferencing system at the Scottish Public Pensions Agency offices in Peebles.

The system gives full integration of the Crestron with the Tandberg -Cisco system including directory dialing and control of other source and output devices.

The panel also includes restricted administrator pages for controlled system settings and improved support functionality.

I was working for Nuvideo

CISCO SCOTLAND “BUSINESS VIDEO PARTNER OF THE YEAR 2011″

The National Museum of Scotland re-opened last weekend after months of refurbishment.

It was a great pleasure to have a small part in this huge project which is so important to Edinburgh and Scotland.

This photo was taken on one of my early site visits and shows the grand main hall with a huge central scaffold during the refurbishment works.

If you follow the link below you will see what it looked like at the opening this weekend.

I was able to assist the guys at Balfour Kirkpatrick with the theatrical lighting in the 200 seater Lecture Theatre which was also fully refurbished as part of the project.  Working with Thomas Silk who is now working with Haden Young.

BBC – National Museum of Scotland to reopen after £47m refit

Lighting Controls systems installed at St Andrew’s Cathedral Glasgow and St Columba’s in Oban held very different challenges in commissioning but both very rewarding projects to be involved with.

The system in Oban involved DALI ballasts for all the high level lighting allowing changes to the addressing to be made without the need for expensive access equipment.

The Glasgow site as you can see from the photos below has a huge mix of types of lighting to spectacular effect and included four controllers spread over the cathedral building to balance loading correctly.

Tech Blurb:

Oban: The control system is an Edin NPU controlling evolution control packs and an Edin Universal ballast controller with a number of plates controlling lighting scenes and contactors to the huge St columba’s bells shown above.

The system includes time control, presence control and 0-10v Fluorescent dimming.

These dimmers have evolved over the years most noticeable in the last couple of years with a face lift on the scene plates using a similar format to the evolution system single gang plates.

With these systems in exsistance in so many premises though out the UK and across the world I thought it might be helpful to point out a couple of maintenance issues that can crop up on these units over the years.

Indicator Lights:

The tiger panels have a number of useful indicator lights which give a good starting point to fault finding.

• Phase presence indicator lights : Three green or orange indicators letting you know that you have incoming phases present. (NB: prior to any internal fuses)
• Channel indicator lamps : The red indicator lamps on the dimmer cards are indicative of the control output of the relevant channel.

Electronics Fuses:

For any maintenance engineer these should be the first place to start. The power supply board on a Tiger panel has three 20mm  500mA fuses (one per phase) located next to the phase presence indicator lights. These electronics fuses provide the low voltage control supply to the dimmer cards. The supply is spread across the three phases equally and so the tell tale sign for a blown electronic fuse is the non-operation of a number of circuits on the same or adjacent dimmer cards.

DMX Inputs:

The DMX inputs on tiger systems are really useful for taking control of a system from a DMX lighting desk however in a number of installations they remain unused. These inputs take over control of the lighting channels from the scene plates when a dmx signal is detected on the input. As standard at commissioning time  it is best practice to short out the DMX data in to avoid noise problems. The tell tale of this fault is when the plates give no operation over all channels in the complete system.

Triac Faults:

This fault should be familiar to all those who maintain lighting control systems when a triac fails it usually fails short circuit meaning that the output of the dimmer always receives 240v non-dimmed and hence the faulty circuit remains on at 100% regardless of the control logic.  Triacs for tiger dimmers can be replaced easily using non-solder connections.

Warning:

Only competent persons should attempting to carry out maintenance on lighting control panels .

Lighting control panels have 240v and often 440V supply present and you should ensure and  isolate supply to panels before removing panel covers.

This week I have been working on Prodigy Controls Programming in Darvel (North Aryshire).

Prodigy is the newest addition to the Crestron range and is simply a stripped down processor and limited controller options.

This project involved a single zone system with lighting, AV and Digital audio.

Today I was working on behalf of  GlobalIS

I was working on a number of Crestron controlled system’s with presentation systems, video conferencing and voicecall functionality.

I was providing programming support working on this occasion with nuVideo audio Video Solutions

4 rooms with standalone I/O DSI modules were commissioned plus a larger system consisting of 45 ballasts, a mixture of zumtobell and philips,

Commissioning was carried out using the browser interface to the Edin NPU which allows full configuration and provides DALI commissioning tools.

“All were all identified very quickly with no problems, the Dali commissioning interface works very well”. D Aberdeen – Lighting Control