Tim Edwards

Tim is our new Technical Sales Manager, who brings with him the knowledge and experience from four years of Pharos technical support. His understanding of installation requirements will be invaluable in supporting our dealers and installers at all levels of the bidding and sales process.

Tim is also responsible for Pharos customers in the UK and central Europe, and acts as the primary contact for Pharos dealers in the Asia Pacific region.

Paul McLean

Paul has joined us after over 20 years experience in the industry, spending over a decade with Telmaco, Telvin and later EVC providing design and project services for many major installations in Greece and the Middle East. He has also offered product support for a wide range of manufacturers, including Flying Pig Systems, High End Systems and ADB, as well as design and programming services for several live events and high profile TV productions.

Based out of Athens, Paul is our Sales Manager for Southern Europe and the Middle East. Paul will be the main point of contact for our distribution partners and key specifiers in these regions.

Thomas Ladd

For the Americas, Thomas Ladd continues to look after this important region from his base in Boston, building new relationships and supporting projects.  Thomas also provides advanced programming for certain projects as well as technical training courses for Pharos programmers.

Supporting them from the London office is Cascade Snowman. Cas is our Sales Coordinator and deals with all customer quotations and purchase orders, shipping and accounts.

To make it easier for you to direct your enquiries to the sales team we have created a new email address; please feel free to send any sales communication to sales@pharoscontrols.com.

Pharos Touch Panel Controller

With a month to go until The ARC Show in London, the finalists have just been announced for the inaugural ARC Innovation Awards.

The judges have recognised fifteen products for consideration, including the Pharos Touch Panel Controller.

If you are planning to visit the show you can register on line. Visitors to the show will be able to vote for their favourite product in the innovation awards.

Hope to see you there – you are most welcome to drop by the Pharos stand, M1!

Jack Morton Worldwide © Mark Livemore

In Durham Marenghi’s stunning lighting design, temporary Arena Color fixtures and high power searchlights installed by Stage Electrics and supplied by ELP/Syncrolite are integrated with the permanent lighting installations on the London Eye and County Hall.  At the climax of the event, the lighting is synchronised with the fantastic midnight firework display, designed by Darryl Fleming of Kimbolton Fireworks.

Year-round, 640 Philips Color Kinetics ColorCasts illuminate the Eye, supplied by Architainment Lighting and controlled by two Pharos LPC 2s.  The façade of County Hall is floodlit with Philips Color Kinetics ColorReach Powercore LEDs, also supplied by Architainment and also controlled by another Pharos LPC 1.

This is the sixth New Year’s Eve that Pharos has been involved, ever since the London Eye lighting refit in 2006. In the afternoon of 31^st December, the discrete Pharos systems are uploaded with special programming for the event, their internal clocks are synchronised with a GPS timecode receiver, and then they’re left to perform by themselves.  Programming is accurate to a hundredth of a second and is in step with the ChamSys lighting consoles and the fireworks controller.

Jack Morton Worldwide © Mark Livemore

Naturally the focus is on the breathtaking midnight sequence but the show design includes lighting for the whole evening during the build up to the celebrations.  Pharos Technical Product Manager Simon Hicks has programmed the Pharos systems for Durham for the last five years.  He explains, “This is the time when we can really show off what we can do with the Eye – for the rest of the year the lighting is mostly static with a few subtle effects to mark certain occasions.”

Durham has also commented that, “Lighting is used to complement and enhance the firework display as well as creating an exciting and dynamic atmosphere of anticipation before the midnight chimes of Big Ben to entertain the 250,000 people gathered in Westminster to witness the event and the millions who enjoy the broadcast on the BBC.”

Cristo del Pacifico Opening Ceremony

Cristo del Pacífico is a mystical monument located in Chorrillos, Lima, Peru. The 122ft (37m) high statue, representing Jesus Christ, is a farewell gift from President Alan Garcia to the country of Peru and the city of Lima. The iconic sculpture provides city beautification and it has already become a part of everyday life for all residents of Lima through its dynamic, colour-changing design.

Pharos Designer in action

Cristo del Pacífico speaks to the city through a wide palette of colours, changing its appearance according to a carefully designed schedule. The Pharos LPC tracks over 50 dates, dynamically changing the lighting to commemorate religious and national holidays as well as significant anniversaries of historical Peruvian and world events. 16 powerful Philips Color Kinetics ColorReach fixtures, mounted at both the sculpture’s base and on two lighting towers, bring out the sculpture’s depth and beauty.

The lighting system is also comprised of a wireless broadband connection to the Internet, a Panasonic IP camera mounted on one of the lighting towers and a custom iPad web interface. LED-LS designed, engineered and programmed the system with remote management in mind – utilising Pharos Installation Manager and the live IP camera, they can view the installation from anywhere in the world, control the lighting and make programming changes.

The inaugural lighting of the monument was on 29th July 2011 when President Alan Garcia presented his gift to Peru, making use of the iPad interface to officially light up the statue for the first time in front of thousands of people, who were then treated to a spectacular fireworks display.

Statue overlooks the city

Using discovery to find KiNet power supplies on the same network as the computer running Pharos Designer is a simple process. In the Patch view of Designer, select KiNet from the tabs of different protocols. You’ll see something similar to the screenshot below:

KiNet tab in patch

Let’s first take the case where you are starting a new project. If your power supplies are on the same network as Designer then you can discover them now by clicking the ‘Discover’ button. When discovery is complete, click on the ‘Show Discovered’ button to see a table of discovered power supplies. Select the power supply you want to add to your project by pressing the button on the left of the table row and click ‘Add Selected to Project’. Alternatively, you can click ‘Add All To Project’ to add all of the discovered power supplies to the project at once. You can now patch your fixtures to the power supplies.

KiNet Discovery in progress

Now let’s say you’ve patched fixtures to power supplies offline but don’t know the IP addresses of the real power supplies. For this example we have created a new power supply by going to the Patch view of Designer and clicking on the ‘Add’ button in the Protocols tab on the right of the application window. It is crucial that you select the correct type of power supply in preparation for associating later. We have patched a 2×2 iTile to the power supply, which we have named ‘iTile’ for reference.

Adding a PSU offline

With Designer on the same network as the power supply, click the ‘Discover’ button as before then select the discovered power supply that you want to associate. Select the pre-patched power supply from the Power Supply list (‘iTile’ in the case of our example) and click the ‘Apply Selected to Power Supply’ button.

Linking discovered PSUs

It’s worth noting that if you have multiple network interfaces active on your computer, Designer will ask you which interface you want to use to discover power supplies. Every time you click ‘Discover’ the table of discovered power supplies will be emptied and then repopulated with the power supplies on the chosen network interface.

For more information on patching in Pharos Designer, see this page on our online help.

This screencast is also available via our iTunes podcast.

To create your own layouts for Interface Editor, you will need to understand how the XML in the layout files translates to the positions of items on the screen of the TPC. To help you get started, I will use the example of the ‘4 Button 6 Slider’ layout which comes with Interface Editor. To find the XML file behind this layout on Windows, navigate to /Program Files/Pharos/Interface Editor/library/layout/. On Mac OS X, right-click Pharos Interface Editor in your Applications folder and select ‘Show Package Contents’, then browse to /Content/Resources/layout/. Look for the file named ‘4_button_6_slider.xml’ in this folder.  A screenshot containing the text in the XML file is below for reference. It’s a good idea to get a text editor that can handle XML when working with custom layouts, such as Notepad++.

Example XML

The first line defines the properties of the layout. Here you can change the name of the layout as it appears in the New Page wizard in Interface Editor, but note that two layouts can’t have the same name, otherwise only one will be available in Interface Editor. You can also change the orientation of the layout between landscape and portrait. Removing the ‘orientation’ attribute will allow the layout to be used in both orientations – some layouts are more flexible than others.

The next line is the start of an hbox, which stands for ‘horizontal box’. The hbox is one of two types of layout box that are available; the other is the vbox. These boxes are used to contain a number of different items and the direction of the layout of these items is decided by the type of box you put them in. A vbox arranges items from top to bottom and an hbox arranges items from left to right. Boxes can contain other boxes, as shown in this example: the top level hbox contains a vbox and an hbox.

Boxes support a spacing and a margin attribute. The spacing is the measurement in pixels between each item; the margin is the number of pixels between the outline of the box and the items inside.

Boxes in a Layout

In the vbox shown, there are four buttons, each 10 pixels from its neighbour. In the XML file, you can see that there’s a spacer at the top and bottom of the list of items in the vbox. The spacers push the items together as far as the box’s spacing attribute will allow – otherwise they’d spread out to fill the space available.

If you look at the button definitions in the XML file, you can see that it’s possible to specify a width and height, though this is optional – items will distribute themselves evenly and expand to fill the available space in their box if you don’t provide this information.  The lower hbox in the XML file contains the sliders. You can see that this appears next to the vbox in the image above because it’s inside the top level hbox.

Another way of laying out items is in a grid. This method allows you to easily layout items in rows and columns. The screen shot below shows the XML for the ‘12 buttons’ layout, which you can find in the same folder as the previous layout. As you can see, 4 rows and 3 columns have been specified, along with a spacing and margin of 10 pixels. This will distribute the listed buttons around the grid and separate them by 10 pixels in each direction. These grids can be used in boxes, allowing for complex, nested layouts to be created with ease.

Grid XML Example

The items that you have available to you are button, slider, label, keypad, colourpicker and spacer.

Next time, we will look at how to create your own custom layouts. If you feel like having a go now, make sure you save your layouts in the directory /Documents/Pharos/Interface Editor/Layouts/ to ensure they do not get deleted if you uninstall Interface Editor.

Property Editor

In this example, the buttons have captions which appear on the item, and we have given them a key that relates to their caption. You edit the key in the property editor, found on the right of the application window. Here, for the ‘Activate’ button, we have assigned the key ‘activate’ which will be very easy to assign when we come to setup triggers in Designer.

Once you have linked your Interface Editor project to a TPC in your Designer project, you can start creating triggers. Have a look at the controller properties section of the Designer online help for more information about linking Interface Editor projects to TPCs.

Trigger in Designer

The first thing to do when creating triggers for the TPC is to set the controller number to the relevant controller in your project. This populates the trigger parameter editors with control keys from your Interface Editor project. As you can see in the screenshot, when creating a TPC Button  trigger, the control keys that we assigned to the buttons have been added to the drop down menu, making it simple to link your buttons to triggers.

For larger, more complex files, it’s a good idea to leave the control keys as their defaults. This enables you to use one trigger to respond to multiple items by capturing the number in the control key as a variable. You can do this using the standard variable capturing syntax used in Serial and Ethernet triggers, for example you would type ‘button<3d>’ into the button name box to match any button with a default control key, capturing the number as variable 1. You can then use this in an action or a script just as you would with any other variable.

Please have a look at our online help for more information on TPC triggering and on using variables in trigger actions.