With the hoists hanging over 130ft up in the grid, their movement is barely audible even during complete silence, rare when a show is being rigged. The view is obscured from most positions in the Hall, including the main control area, by an aluminium skin cladding the grid. Frost therefore sought "a tried-and-tested, foolproof system with all the safety features that would stop the rig moving if a motor stopped".
To achieve this requirement, Kinesys first upgraded the Hall's hardware and software, enabling them to use encoded hoists for accurate and repeated positioning of trusses and hoists.
Kinesys supplied a custom designed cabinet incorporating 20 of their new four-channel positioning control cards - the same ones that are at the heart of their new Smart 8 controllers. This has an Ethernet connection to the control computer and interconnections into the Royal Albert Hall's main non-positioning switchgear cabinet that has been controlling the system for the past eight years.
The new positioner cards receive data from the control computer, send signals to the main switchgear cabinet to initiate movement of the appropriate hoists, and then monitor the position of the hoists via their encoders before stopping the hoist at the correct place. As part of the first phase, Kinesys also expanded the existing switchgear cabinet from 70 to 80 channels of control.
The second phase of the installation involved supplying three Kinesys Smart 8 controllers, expanding the total number of channels to 104. These simply connect to the Ethernet network to receive their data and are also hooked into the upgraded emergency stop system. A 40-way manual system was also installed to offer layers of backup and redundancy to a venue where dark/maintenance days rarely get out of single figures in a year.
The whole system is controlled from a customised version of Kinesys' Vector software with a new graphical interface designed for use with a touch-screen. The system uses a CAD drawing of the Hall roof as its background and allows hoists to be dragged onto and around the screen so that they accurately represent the layout in real life. The hoists are then simply touched to 'select' and then set to run up or down.
(Jim Evans)
