Selected Case Studies

Outernet London’s The Now Building is an immersive entertainment space boasting the world’s largest high-resolution wrap-around screens and a futuristic live events venue to boost London’s live music scene. 

Delivering every aspect of the complex lighting control requirements for this design, first project work with Simmtronic began back in 2015, with design work from mid-2018 through to 2020, when worked officially started on site. Completed phase build and witnessed in Q3/Q4, with fit out works at completion stage in January 2022. 

Simmtronic were provided with the drawings and specs from Skanska. The client was in search of an answer to a DMX solution and had to interface to a central battery system. The client required a system that could deliver all commercial lighting controls throughout the office and back of house areas, emergency lighting control, monitoring throughout the site and architectural lighting controls for the exterior of the building.  

The system had to be capable of controlling everything and work across all spaces, providing details and fault feedback on lighting installation at all times. It needed to be scalable to incorporate all of Outernet’s future requirements for the site.  

So how did we achieve this? Simmtronic provided SPX Area Controllers and SPH.27R & SPH.48R lighting control modules throughout. Our SPO.22 DMX Interfaces were used extensively to integrate the RGBW external lighting, with all other lighting throughout the entire internal building controlled via DALI, same for both BOH and in Fit-Out office spaces with Emergency Monitoring and Interfacing to a Central Battery across the entire site. 

All emergency lighting is provided via a large Eaton Central battery system, which is interfaced into the Simmtronic Automatic Monitoring & Testing System. All emergency luminaires are monitored via DALI, with testing from the Simmtronic Head End PC, which ensures a robust and compliant emergency lighting system is provided. All faults are easily identified so they can be fixed in a timely manner. 

The DMX RGBW (Colour Changing Red Green Blue & White), the DALI 3000K exterior lighting and in-ground Fibre Optic Lighting ‘magic carpet’ from UFO, is an outstanding and eye-catching feature of the premises, providing huge flexibility when setting the mood and aesthetically complimenting the wrap around floor to ceiling screens (four story 360-degree 8k screens with 4D interactive capabilities) throughout the immersive entertainment building. London will be the first of a global roll-out of these cultural districts.  

The project was unique in its challenges and appeal. We took part in many challenging meetings with the design teams, selecting the best equipment to achieve the client’s desired look for the exterior of the building. This equipment needed to work correctly with the gear that was selected and integrate with LPA Lighting and Energy Solutions to achieve the correct luminaires. We worked closely with Amanda Radley from LPA on this and regularly met the consultant and Skanska throughout the process. Simmtronic had to make sure all the drivers were installed within a limited space and remained accessible. Our team liaised with Skanska and Eaton Central Battery to ensure the systems were capable of operating together and achieving the desired testing and reporting capabilities. The testing and reporting were available on our Head End, the interface allowed us to put the Eaton system into test mode.  

Outernet London was an extremely ambitious yet impressive project for us to be involved with. On the one hand was the architectural element which had the DMX and colour changing control of the lighting, this was difficult to scope as the use of the building is variable, what they required was a flexible arrangement. On the other hand, we had the more complex lighting control interfacing with emergency monitoring to the central battery system and many architectural type systems struggle with this. Our Simmtronic system was able to achieve both elements and meet the consultant’s brief with regards to control philosophy to the architectural side and the more complex interfacing with the third-party central battery system. We were selected by Skanska as we could achieve both.  

“The St Giles project was complicated for many reasons. The exterior lighting, in particular, changed from White to RGBW part way through the project. This called for new luminaires to be created in order to create the desired lit effect but also to be in keeping with the building aesthetics and architecture. In addition, the change from White to RGBW also meant the addition of DMX to Dali controls and the need to integrate this into the originally specified Dali system.  

Working with Rob from Simmtronic was an absolute pleasure. We had to work very closely to understand the interfaces required, Dali addresses needed and to communicate this to the installing team. Rob explained things extremely clearly and documented the changes at all stages to deliver the final solution to the client. We experienced great teamwork both during the specification stages and commissioning where we worked closely to achieve the excellent results which can be clearly seen.”  

Amanda Radley, LPA Lighting.