//Henley Square
Henley Square is one of Adelaide's most beloved coastal precincts - a busy public gathering space metres from the beach, exposed year-round to salty air, high humidity and the full force of Southern Ocean weather. When the City of Charles Sturt Council sought to transform the square with a permanent dynamic lighting installation, the brief demanded something that could perform at the highest visual standard while withstanding extreme weather and coastal conditions.
Scope
Light-Ctrl was engaged as the project partner to provide systems design, hardware supply, programming and ongoing support of the complete lighting system. The project delivering over 1,300x RGBW pixel nodes suspended across the square on a bespoke catenary wire system, creating an overhead canopy of DMX controlled lighting that softly animates the space from dusk through to late evening.
The installation continues to perform without issue through heavy rainfall, coastal winds and the full Adelaide summer thanks to the sysetm’s rugged build. A direct result of the engineering rigour applied at every stage of the project. On request, the City of Charles Sturt Council can update the content schedule for special events and community activations.
The Solution
Initially we tried an off the shelf product and it failed. Although rated at IP66 on the datasheet, it mechanically wasn’t engineered for the extreme environment at Henley Beach. IP-rating is only a single piece of the environmental design puzzle.
We went back to the drawing board and that’s where Vectrpix vDot Rugged was born. Built from solid aluminium with a C5 rated marine-grade powdercoat finish, each IP67-rated node is now better suited to high temperature variations and exposure to wet, windy and corrosive environments. We also developed a custom catenary bracket of stainless steel and rubber to dampen movement on the catenary.
The control stack - Advatek PixLite Mk3 and Madrix 5 - delivers true 16-bit dimming (65,536 steps per channel) at 300fps! The result is flicker-free, gradient-smooth animation that reads cleanly to the naked eye and runs autonomously on a preset schedule with remote updates as requested.
