Australia - The new Craigieburn Bypass now provides a freeway link between the Melbourne Metropolitan Ring Road and the Hume Freeway in Australia's second city. Amongst the unique features of this road-building project is the world's first traffic controlled lighting effect, conceived by landscape architects Taylor Cullity Lethlan and engineers Webb Australia in conjunction with local artist Robert Owen. The system was then designed and installed by Lightmoves Pty Ltd.

A 300m matrix of colour changing LEDs, forming part of an acoustic barrier to reduce road noise, was installed parallel to the road. The design brief required the lighting effects to be controlled and regulated by transducers in the road. Lightmoves turned to Artistic Licence to provide the necessary control software via Colour-Tramp.

Colour-Tramp is best known for its ability to control colour changing arrays with ease. Perhaps less well know is the sophisticated system that allows almost any lighting effect to be controlled by external events such as MIDI or RS232 triggers. Lightmoves combined Colour-Tramp with the AMX NI-3000 product. The NI-3000 provided the interface to the traffic counter system and provided RS232 triggers to Colour-Tramp. The final effect creates and controls colour sequences depending upon the volume of traffic.

Joe Casamento of Lightmoves says: "Colour-Tramp was a great tool for us. It easily enabled us to program the wall by importing the artist's computer bitmaps. Colour-Tramp's ability to have a full on-screen representation of the wall meant that a lot of programming could be done off-site."

(Lee Baldock)


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