Pathway Rooms Design and Operations Guide - Manual (Page 3)

Pathport Rooms – Operations, Maintenance and Design – Page 3
Overview
Pathport
®
Rooms is a room-combine system for control consoles, providing a
DMX Management System for Divisible Halls.
Convention centers, meeting rooms and ballrooms often have the ability to be
reconfigured into several smaller rooms. While architectural control systems can
manage the control of room lighting in these special facilities, portable
entertainment control consoles can be a problem. Pathport Rooms ensures that
a console connected in one room doesn’t “spill over” and control lights that it
shouldn’t in the next room.
In this document, “Hall” refers to the entire space. “Room” refers to a smaller
area within the hall created by moving or closing temporary interior walls. Many
hotels and convention centers refer to these smaller rooms as ‘salons’.
Operational Philosophy
The Rooms Control Module is preprogrammed with a map of the hall and all
possible room layout schemes within the hall. Associated with each layout
scheme is a specific DMX channel routing table. Routing tables are based on
the initial design specification and are created during the set-up, programming
and commissioning of the system. With this information, the Rooms Control
Module acts like a DMX patch bay with built-in signal splitting and merging
options.
System hardware is interconnected using readily-available Ethernet wiring and
switches. Power-over-Ethernet is supported to further minimize wiring
requirements.
DMX input and output access points are provided in each possible room, using
Pathport
®
nodes. Contact closure modules or an installation-specific selection
interface – typically a pushbutton switch matrix (by others) – report the hall’s
current layout scheme to the Rooms Control Module.
As the configuration is changed, Rooms dynamically reassigns the DMX
channels available in each given room of the hall. By automatically managing
the channel routing, Rooms ensures an entertainment control console can only
access the dimmers, moving lights and other devices within each desired area.
Because reassignment can include the merging or prioritizing of input sources, a
Rooms
system is typically interfaced with an architectural control system, so the
general room or ‘house’ light controls are also automatically reconfigured
according to the specific layout schemes.