Despite this being a huge lighting system, the control processor was just a computer in an electronics rack. This super-sized control room centre was specified to be really really large for such a control unit. This processor controlled everything – the street lights, the stairwell lights, the corridor lights, the outside of the stadium, the inner football lights, and the LED battens on the stadium rim. Every control node needed to be in a mode that should the control signal be lost they would turn everything on rather than put the entire site into blackout.
The upper rim of the stadium has LED Battens that are mounted in an asymmetric pattern. The had to be loaded into a matrix within the software so a Video can be played across the Matrix. The Video content was requested, created remotely in the UK and then emailed over. Transferring these videos through Teamviewer into the processor and then playing across the stadium.
You can see we’re in the desert. The sun setting causes a high wind as the temperature rapidly drops from very high to very low. Lighting fixtures on the outside of the building are installed and replaced by a technician on a rope abseiling from the rim of this over 13-storey stadium – something you can’t do in a high wind.
My programming laptop does not have anywhere near the
processing capability to control such a huge installation. For this reason, it’s just used as an interface via TeamViewer to remotely control the processing control that’s inside the stadium. Using a wifi dongle to connect into the stadium’s processor. Over the course of the project, about 185 different versions of the control software were released. The laptop also used to update the server software in the stadium.
The building is so large that the laptop, plastic chair,
table and wifi dongle would need to be setup in four different locations to see the entire result of the programming. Main control position near the out-buildings was used to sort initial programming and then a 20 minute walk between the three other locations to run the sequences and check the programming would take a few hours
An on-site selfie.
