ENTTEC at Jordan's Furniture

	Jordan's Furniture

In this brave new world of the 21st century, shopping has merged with family entertainment. Case in point: Jordan's Furniture, located in New Haven, Connecticut. Jordan's Furniture is a store that also happens to be a popular entertainment destination. In fact, the store is home to the world's largest indoor adventure ropes course, which includes four zip lines, two free fall jumps, and a breezeway, as well as a water show and a pizza parlor. The adventure ropes course is filled with a plethora of theatrical LED lighting, and lighting designer Michelle Caron of Clair Solutions of Manheim, Pennsylvania needed a reliable LED control system. So she turned to ENTTEC Americas, based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, for a solution. Caron explains, "It's not a human operated performance venue, it's a venue with practically no humans interfacing at all. The system runs 12 hours a day, 360 days a year."

The Jordan's Furniture adventure ropes course is home to 364 LED fixtures from several different manufacturers that needed DMX control; the show also needed to be played back consistently and reliably. Caron did some research and found the ENTTEC Datagate MK2. The Datagate MK2 is a bridge between the lighting controls and any DMX512 device; it also can expand DMX networks, gather health information about lighting fixtures, and input DMX signals into 3D visualization software.

The Datagate MK2 was the ideal solution for Caron and the project. "The reason the Datagate appealed to me was its ability to speak different languages in the field -- DMX, RDM, streaming sACN, ArtNet. It was the right piece of gear that fit into the networking environment -- it has the ability to take streaming sACN from the lighting console and turn it into DMX, and it did that very well, which is exactly what we needed," she notes. RDM monitoring is another part of the formula at Jordan's Furniture that is handled by the Datagate. "It's really gratifying to see that Michelle and her project had the foresight to include RDM monitoring of the fixtures they used. This trend is growing slowly but surely now that people are learning how it benefits them to be able to use this bidirectional data flow," says ENTTEC Americas general manager, Jeremy Kumin.

On site, the ENTTEC Datagate was the perfect choice for this "just push play" application. "Overall, the Datagate is pretty straightforward; there are not a lot of deep menus, and it's hard for an uninformed user to get in and really mess with the details of it. If you want to get in and make significant changes, you have to access the device through the web interface. If someone's just pushing buttons on the faceplate, it's difficult to do a lot more than restart it," Caron says.

The Datagate also has an easy-to-use web interface. Caron explains, "The web interface allows you to build your own profile in an easy way; you don't need to be a programmer to set up your own profile."

The Datagate MK2 is not the only piece of ENTTEC equipment on the project. ENTTEC RDS4 and RDS8 opto/isolated splitters are used in the adventure ropes course. "They take a single universe of output from the Datagate, split the information and send it out," Caron says.

As a company, ENTTEC has brought more than just hardware to Jordan's Furniture. Caron explains, "The customer service at ENTTEC is awesome; they're really great to work with. If they don't have an answer, they find one for you right away. That's really, really helpful, especially when you're in a high stakes environment out in the field, and you don't have any internet and your cell service is iffy. Knowing you can give someone a call and you have someone on the other end that can help you roll through problems and find solutions is always really awesome, and one of the things that I value most with any manufacturer."

For more information on the Datagate MK2 and the ENTTEC RDS4 and RDS8 opto/isolated splitters, please contact ENTTEC at 888-454-5922 or via the URL below.