Thierry Bernin, project manager at Impact Evenement, which conducted the event, was brought on board to devise a solution for lighting the windows. He selected Arcaline LED lamps from Aryton and to ensure seamless communications between the lights on different floors, he chose ELC's Buddy.
He explained, "Buddy was recommended to me by Axente who were very enthusiastic about a new product on the market that was very easy to use. The Arcaline products have a DMX interface but not Ethernet. Buddy made it easy to convert the signal. With one Buddy on each floor this enabled the spotlights to be linked by DMX cable, Buddy took the console data in the computer rack on each floor, and converted it, enabling us to operate the spotlights."
Despite being just six months old, Buddy is capturing the imagination of lighting designers across the world. The Buddy boasts the same quality and reliability as all ELC Lighting's products, yet at half the price of the company's professional range. Giving the power of 1024 DMX channels, the Buddy is a two-port DMX-Ethernet node compatible with Art-Net, sACN and ShowNet and is fully supported by ELC Lighting's dmXLAN software, providing features such as setting up the DMX ports for complete dynamic merging of different DMX sources, control fixture for testing and rig start up and RDM (Remote Device Management) support.
For this particular project, Orange requested that the lighting of the building was achieved without jeopardising anyone's safety. This meant no wires running up the stairs between floors and under fire doors. Using Buddy, Thierry was able to devise a solution that made this possible.
Thierry continued, "I understand that Buddy was originally designed with newcomers to the market in mind, but it is an excellent product for all who work in the industry. Not all products have a RJ45 interface but Buddy converts them to DMX effortlessly. For an amateur it's easy to use and much cheaper than a node. It's easy to parameter and small enough to carry in your back pocket - perfect if like me you're called upon to test a network when you least expect to."
(Jim Evans)
