Hurrairah bin Sohail discusses the intricacies of deploying a videowall system at Air Liquide’s control room in Malaysia with HIKA where meeting the client's requirements was not as easy as it looked on the surface.
Air Liquide is a French multinational
company which supplies industrial
gases and services to various
industries. The company ï¬tted
out a control room at its facility in
Malaysia to monitor the production of industrial
gases across many different countries.
Hitecindo Kharisma (HIKA) was engaged as the
supplier for the videowall which graces the Air
Liquide control room.
Air Liquide had a clear idea of what it wanted the
control room environment to be. Burrd Lim from
HIKA 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, Simplex Design.
To be honest, it is a very nice control room with
soft lighting and curved surfaces. On the videowall
side, they had a good idea of the flexibility and
performance that they wanted.”
Regarding the project itself, Lim says: “The project
was quite unique. In a traditional control room, you
have a few operators and each will have one or two
PCs. For the Air Liquide control room the design
criteria were different. 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 was that each operator
has two PCs and each PC has four outputs. In a
typical situation you would have eight monitors, one
for each output. In addition to these workstation
PCs, there are some general workstations that each
operator needs to be able to access and control. So
each operator would essentially need 12 monitors
to view all the outputs he or she needs to access.”
Matters were complicated by the furniture
selection. Lim says: “The operator consoles only had
space for three monitors. We used curved monitors
and managed to squeeze in four. But that was still
not enough. So outputs from all the PCs go into
the videowall controller which not only sends the
signals to the videowall but also to the 12 monitors
used by the three operators.” Each operator has
access to a 4x1 array of Samsung C24F390FHE
monitors.
HIKA set out to design a videowall system that
could deliver the capabilities required by Air Liquide.
The main 4x2 videowall 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 videowalls. In Malaysia, the options are
LG, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic. In terms of
technical speciï¬cations and hardware, there is almost
no difference. We make our selection based on
competitiveness and availability.”
The core of the videowall system is the Nexus
DCx videowall controller, which uses Datapath’s
ImageDP4, VisionHD4+ and Express11.
Lim says: “HIKA has been installing videowalls for
control rooms since the late 90s. After a few years
in the market, we learned two things. The design
philosophy of the American and European brands
did not ï¬t local requirements. So around the year
2000, we decided to establish a small development
team and started making our own videowall
controller. We chose the Datapath card and our
design philosophy moving forward was geared
towards local requirements.”
The ability to provide a customised solution using
reputable hardware was integral in the delivery of
the project. Lim explains: “Conventional videowall
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 being displayed on any of the monitors.
We overcame this with our touch screen solution so
what they see on the monitor 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 a 22-in Dell 3263T monitor for the 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 an adapter to convert
to DVI. From the videowall
controller to the videowall 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.
“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 [as possible]
because accessing the runs later would be difï¬cult.”
While HIKA might have had a customised
solution that met Air Liquide’s needs, there were still
challenges to overcome. Lim narrates: “Initially we
had been told that the outputs from the PCs would
be DVI. So we conï¬gured our controllers to accept
DVI input. When we went to install the videowall
we found that all the outputs from the PCs were
Displayport. On top of that we found that some
of the controllers were standard Diplayport while
others were Displayport ++. We had to change tack
to accommodate this.”
Audio alerts also had to be taken into account.
Lim says: “Operators at Air Liquide might not be
accessing their own workstations at all times due
to the nature of the operations. This means that
they might miss some video alerts in certain niche
situations. To minimise this we installed an audio
alert system. The Extron BUC-202 is used as part of
this system. Because the audio alert is such a critical
part of the system, we chose the Extron product for
its robustness and reliability.”
To conclude, Lim says: “We were not able to
fulï¬l all of Air Liquide’s requirements for the
videowall. This was not because we were unable
to but because of budgetary and time constraints.
So there are some features such as conï¬guring our
touchscreens for multi-wall use with more detailed
hierarchies that we are currently working on.”