Background
Air Liquide is a French multinational company which supplies industrial gases and services to various industries. The company fitted out a control room at its facility in Malaysia to monitor the production of industrial gasses across many different countries.
Hitecindo Kharisma (HIKA) was engaged as the supplier for the video wall which graces the Air Liquide control room. The project had a quick turnaround, only taking 6-months from first contact to the full commissioning and installation. Air Liquide had a clear idea of what it wanted the control room environment to be.
Burrd Lim from HIKA talks about how the project progressed says: “There were two aspects to the control room with regards to client requirements. One was regarding aesthetics and how it looked, which was handled by the interior designer, and the other was on the video wall side, they had a good idea of the flexibility and performance that they wanted.”
The Challenge
The project itself was unique. Lim says: “In a traditional control room, you have a few operators and each will have one or two PCs. These will connect with our video wall controller which will receive inputs, be it HDMI or DVI, from the workstation and these will be pumped to the video wall. For the Air Liquide control room the design criteria were different.”
Lim continues, “Firstly, none of the three operator consoles were meant to have PC hardware housed nearby. Part of the reason for this was aesthetics and part of it was because of the console furniture that had been selected. It would be tricky to put the PC hardware there. So the PCs are all installed away from the operators in an equipment rack.
“The other complication Lim found was that each operator had two PCs with four outputs each. A more typical situation would have been eight monitors, one for each output. But, in addition to these workstation PCs, there were some general workstations that each operator needed to be able to access and control. So each operator essentially required 12 monitors to view all the outputs he or she needed to access.
A further challenge was the furniture selection. Lim adds, “The operator consoles only had space for three monitors. We used curved monitors and managed to squeeze in four. But even with them you cannot connect directly to each output. So outputs from all the PCs goes into the video wall controller which not only sends the signals to the video wall but also to the 12 monitors used by the three operators.” Each operator had access to a 4×1 array of Samsung C24F390FHE monitors.
The Solution
HIKA set out to design a video wall system that could deliver the capabilities required by Air Liquide. The main 4×2 video wall itself comprises eight LG 55VM5B units mounted on pop-out brackets, installed on a custom floor mounted structure.
Regarding the selection of the LCD panels Lim comments, “There are only a small handful of manufacturers that can supply ultra-narrow bezel panels for video walls. In Malaysia, there are only two options namely LG and Samsung. In terms of technical specifications and hardware, there is almost no difference between the two. So the decision is made based on pricing.”
The core of the video wall system is the Nexus DCx video wall controller, which uses Datapath’s ImageDP4, VisionHD4+ and Express11. Lim says, “HIKA has been installing video walls for control rooms since the late 90s. But at that time we were selling controllers from Christie and Jupiter Systems. These are high-end products and they are expensive. After a few years in the market, we learned two things. The design philosophy of the American and European brands did not fit local requirements. So around 2000, we decided to establish a small development team and started making our own video wall controller. We chose the Datapath controller and our design philosophy moving forward was geared towards local requirements.”
The ability to provide a customized solution using reputable hardware was integral in the delivery of the project. Lim explains: “Conventional video wall software needs to sit on a workstation. At Air Liquide, an operator in the control room might not actually be accessing their workstation at all times. They might be accessing a shared workstation instead. If you are doing that, then the software on your workstation is no longer active. We overcame this with our touch screen solution so what they see on the screen is what they are supposed to be working on while a separate device can be used to control the content displayed on the screen.”
Three Pipo X10 touchscreens for the operators, and 22-in Dell 3263T monitor for supervisor have been provided. Regarding the operation of the system Lim says: “The source is the workstation PCs.From there we use DisplayPort or DisplayPort ++ cables to the controllers. We didn’t need any extension since both are located quite close by in the rack, we just needed adapter to convert to DVI. From the video wall controller to the video wall and the monitors we use DisplayPort cables. On the monitor end, we use a Datapath dongle to convert to HDMI since the monitors are consumer devices.
Lim added, “I decided to go with DisplayPort cables primarily because they are passive. The cable run was 15m and we used higher quality cables to ensure that no extra hardware would be needed to get the signal. The cable runs were all going to be cemented over so my main concern was to ensure that there were as few points of failure in the cabling because accessing the runs later would be difficult.
Monitoring industrial gasses
Air Liquide is a French multinational company which supplies industrial gases and services to various industries. The company fitted out a control room at its facility in Malaysia to monitor the production of industrial gasses across many different countries
The video wall system
The main 4×2 vide owall itself comprises eight LG 55VM5B units mounted on pop-out brackets, installed on a custom floor mounted structure. The core of the video wall system is the Nexus DCx video wall controller, which uses Datapath’s ImageDP4, VisionHD4+ and Express11.
"The project was quite unique.In a traditional control room, you have a few operators and each will have one or two PCs.These will connect with our video wall controller which will receive inputs, be it HDMI or DVI, from the workstation and these will be pumped to the video wall. For the Air Liquide control room the design criteria were different. "
The Kit List
Video
Aten US424 USB switches
Custom brackets and mount
Datapath Displayport to HDMI convertor
Dell 3263T 22-in monitor
LG 55VM5B panel
Nexus DCx video wall controller using
VisionHD4+ and Express11 backplane
Pipo X10 touchscreens
Samsung C24F390FHE monitors
Unitek Y-262 extenders
Audio
Extron BUC-202 units
