As is so often the case in hospitality venues, for its Fair Play leisure centre, the Saentispark Spa wanted to make operation of lighting and AV systems simple enough for staff to operate with little training.
This required a control system that would provide one-touch commands to power up and down components and set lighting and AV scenes for the whole center, in addition to separate scene control for each area and individual control over AV components. To meet their requirements, Aerne Solutions decided to go with RTI.
The Saentispark Spa in St. Gallen, Switzerland, combines an award-winning four-star hotel with a variety of restaurants, a shopping center, water park, and saunas.
In addition, the property features a three-story leisure center known as Fair Play, where visitors can enjoy bowling, billiards, snooker, mini golf and squash; get in a workout at the gym; play anything from badminton to football in the sports hall or grab a bite to eat in the Fair Play Lounge.
What an atmosphere!
No matter the activity or area in Fair Play, Saentispark relies on lighting, music, and video to create the right atmosphere for guests. However, until recently, controlling this technology throughout the leisure centre was a time-intensive process.
Every morning a maintenance employee would have to spend 15 to 20 minutes going through the centre floor by floor, turning on the lights and displays and setting the background music. In the evening they would have to perform the same operation in reverse.
In addition, the intriguing concept of Disco Bowling, which features its own lighting and music scheme, is held on certain nights of the week. On those nights, the maintenance employee would have to be on hand to help centre staff perform the complicated process of adjusting the lighting and AV systems.
In order to save time and free up the maintenance crew to get on with their own duties, Saentispark wanted to make operation of Fair Play’s lighting and AV systems simple enough for staff to take over with little or no training. Delivering all these ease of use was Arbon-based integrator Aerne Solutions.
“RTI is our control provider of choice and was a perfect fit for the complex installation at Saentispark Spa,” says Pascal Nyffenegger, systems integrator at Aerne Solutions. “The company’s cost-effective platform provides all the advanced functionality of more expensive solutions, while offering extremely simple programming to cater control to each specific project. I’m also an RTI driver developer, which allows us to fulfill just about any customer request.”
Saentispark Spa’s control system is powered by a single RTI XP-8s advanced control processor, in conjunction with two ESC-2+ Ethernet to serial converters.
The processor is controlling Fair Play’s lighting systems, projectors and displays, media servers, set-top boxes and network players, amplifiers and audio matrixes as well as LED curtains.
Staff interact with the system via a KX-10 10in in-wall touch-panel. In the morning, they simply tap the ‘Regular Use’ icon and all the center’s systems and components are powered on and lighting, background music, and video sources are set to the ‘Normal Operation’ scene.
Lighting and AV can also be controlled for each area independent of the overall scene control for the building.
For example, the bowling area can be set up for the Disco Bowling nights with a single tap, or the Fair Play Lounge can be set to Lounge Mode. At the end of the day, staff tap ‘Central Off’, which shuts down all components except for the lights, which change to the ‘Continuous Lighting’ scene and remain on for five minutes before turning off.
“Saentispark has been very pleased with their control system,” adds. Pascal, “Maintenance staff are happy because they no longer have to assist with AV setup and the Fair Play staff was able to start using the system without any instruction. We just showed them the panel and asked that they call us with any questions. They never called, which speaks to how truly intuitive RTI solutions are.”
List of RTI products
1 x XP-8s Advanced control processor
2 x ESC-2+ Ethernet to serial converters
1 x KX-10 10-inch In-wall touch-panel controller