Factory Application & Engineering Support for Sports & Wireless Control Projects

Introduction

Adam: This WiLL Cast was with Jake and
Brian from Wisconsin Lighting Lab. This was really focused around the
engineering support that WiLL provides for sports lighting applications. Sports
lighting applications are quite a bit different than other commercial and
industrial projects we work on — there's a lot of front-end engineering support
and a lot of post-sale engineering support. We went through a recent project
here in the Midwest and talked about some of the controls commissioning and
other post-sale support to really get the customer up to speed, and how
Wisconsin Lighting Lab kind of sets itself apart from other competitors.

Becca: Jake and Brian are two of the
unsung heroes of WiLL. They're really the people that make the magic happen
behind the scenes and help take projects the last mile once it's on site. There
were things that came up with this project that we had never run into before.
You couldn't predict some of the stuff with the wireless controls and the
connectivity. We can't predict those site-induced issues. They're really great
representations of our engineering team and our engineering support and how we
like to really dive in deep on these projects with our customers.

Adam: Regardless of the channel that
the job comes through — our direct channel, our strategic channel — these are
the people that are there really every step of the way. Big shout-out to these
guys. This WiLL Cast is brought to you by WiLL Sport. We have a bunch of
different products: our HSX sports lighter, which is a more traditional sports
lighting fixture — great for retrofit applications, which some of our
competitors don't do. We've got the GTX, which is common for pickleball courts
and tennis complexes. The KBX, our high-end product, which we can combine with
GFX controls. We've got the HDX fixture for interior projects, which can also
be combined with our control systems. If you're interested in partnering with
Wisconsin Lighting Lab, go to WiLLBrands.com or give us a call.

The RF Spectrum Analyzer

Adam: Brian, what is that device?

Brian: Our RF spectrum analyzer. It's
a nice little handheld unit. More often when you see these, it's a giant
half-a-million-dollar benchtop piece of equipment. This is an open-source unit.
It's heavy — big battery. The whole enclosure, even the buttons, are made out
of cast aluminum. I assume that's to mitigate interference since it's a really
sensitive piece of equipment.

Adam: It's funny how sports lighting
has evolved from just bringing a foot-candle meter out to an application to now
having an RF analyzer.

Why Wireless: The GFX System

Adam: With wireless control systems,
Jake, from an application engineering standpoint, what are some of the obvious
advantages of the WiLL Sport GFX system? Why do so many people want to use this
system?

Jake: The biggest thing is the
flexibility. A lot of times when you're working with wireless systems, they
have to be hooked into another network — maybe a school network. You have to
get IT people involved, firewalls that have to be brought down or allowed to
pass through. This system is completely on its own. It's its own system. It's
secure — people from the outside world can't get in. But most importantly to
me, it's just flexible. It can go anywhere. There's weatherproof enclosures.
You can put it outside, in buildings, in press boxes. It can be used on
literally any type of application. That's probably the best selling point,
outside of just the functionality, which is obviously very slick as well.

Features: Scheduling, Entertainment & Ease of Install

Adam: If you had to do the 80/20 on
all the features the system offers, what do you see customers going with?

Brian: The gymnasium project is a good
example. There was no color-changing LEDs on that one, but that was scheduling.
Scheduling is an important feature for everybody. Especially when energy
conservation is important, and when the users of the field are given permission
to control the lighting system — they may not remember to turn the lights off
when they're done with a practice. It's nice to have the scheduling built in to
shut the lights off automatically.

Adam: We have a default schedule. We
kind of specialize in the non-professional fields — the mass-market sports
lighting applications where oftentimes there are no facilities managers. You
have volunteers or coaches, maybe somebody at the school — a Friday Night
Lights type situation. We try and set that schedule at the factory, commission
it at the factory. We've seen a lot of positive feedback on people using the
facility a lot more than they thought — extending hours into the night, kids in
the community able to use it. The scheduling is huge. The entertainment
features are huge. Jake mentioned ease of install — some competing systems, you
have to run actual wired connections to run the entertainment controls.

The Milwaukee Project: RF Interference

Adam: We have a really good example of
a project here in the Midwest where they got all the bells and whistles — RGB,
entertainment, scheduling — but we had to work with them once the system was
installed to work around some RF interference issues. Jake, what did that
process look like on the front end?

Jake: With all these projects, we take
an expanded look at the entire site and what it's going to end up looking like.
We work with the customer to get a baseline understanding of their expectations
and where they'd like to use the system. The user interfaces can be placed in a
variety of areas, but those areas dictate some other things, especially with
range. This job in particular had multiple fields, so we knew there was the
potential need for a range extender for the practice field, which was further
away. The initial conversations were around where they'd like to place the
panel — in this case, the press box, which is very typical — and what the press
box looks like to make sure we don't have a ton of interference with the walls
or other devices.

Jake: As we got into it, right on the
edge of this field there's a large water tower with a ton of cellular antennas
on it. When we did our first walkthrough, we were like, that could be an issue.

Brian: They're cellular — ISM and GSM
bands. Not 5G, because 5G would have been above the frequency of our system.
But the cellular antennas could be an issue because they're literally right
next to the field.

Troubleshooting: Logical Steps

Brian: A good chunk of the system was
working flawlessly as commissioned, but we started going into troubleshooting
mode with some of the communications. Our first step was our ability to
remotely connect to the system — I can do it from our office. If there are
issues at game time or during downtime, I can hop in and try to troubleshoot
over the phone with the customer. That was the first step.

Brian: Conveniently this was down in
Milwaukee, so it's about an hour drive from our office. When I first started
visiting the site, we moved the antenna from inside the press box to outside,
to try to get better signal through the walls. This press box was just wood and
drywall, not brick, which is much harder for RF to get through. The next step
was using some directional antennas to focus the signal where it needs to be,
instead of an omnidirectional antenna which is blasting out signal in a circle.
You can take that wasted signal and reflect it where it needs to go, to amplify
the signal at the fixtures.

Brian: The more we did that, the more
it became obvious that it wasn't just a lack of signal strength. There was
clearly something else overpowering the signal no matter how strong we could
make it. That's where the spectrum analyzer came into play. This tool allowed
us to scan a range of frequencies and get a visual map of what the RF space
looks like. I used some simple tools — literally a sheet of metal as a
reflector. I'd stand with the water tower right in front of me, get a baseline
of the interference, then use the metal to direct where the interference was
coming from, to confirm it was from the water tower and not from the nearby
power lines.

Brian: Once we knew where it was
pinpointed, there were two light poles, each with four fixtures, on the
practice field adjacent to the water tower. What was really interesting was how
near-field the issue was. If you get about 150 feet from that tower — right about
where those two poles were — the interference is intense. The cellular antennas
were directional — several of them were pointed directly over the fixtures. But
you back up 20 or 30 feet from those two poles and the interference drops right
off. All the other fixtures on the rest of that practice field were working
fine. Those two poles, eight fixtures, were almost inoperable.

The Fix: Directional Antennas & Baffles

Brian: We ended up installing
directional antennas on the receiving end, on the poles themselves, and then
put some metal baffles behind the antenna to block the interference coming from
the water tower. That cleaned everything up. Works great.

Brian: There was also a second issue.
As part of their renovation project, they had installed a massive scoreboard —
the biggest video board you've ever seen. It's basically a gigantic metal wall,
and it was completely blocking the signal source to a couple of poles. So what
we did was install a repeater on one of the poles adjacent to the practice
field that had good clear line of sight to the transmitter, and then it relays
the signal over to those poles behind the scoreboard.

Post-Sale Support: The Real Differentiator

Adam: This stresses the importance of
factory support and people who understand the products. In the lighting
industry, oftentimes you have five or six different product companies — a light
pole company, a fixture company, a controls company, an installer sourcing
surge suppression and fuses. What we've tried to do is continue to invest in
being as vertically integrated as possible so we can work through this stuff.

Jake: The biggest thing is just the
ability to continue to provide support after it's installed. Typically we're
not working directly with the end user — we're working with an engineer, sales
rep, or contractor. But once the end user gets it in their hands and starts
really diving into the system, they start to form their own opinions of what
they want. That can differ a lot from the engineer that specifies it on the
front end.

Jake: Not too long ago, we had a
project at a college out east. Our standard scheduling page uses sundown as the
default timer, but they wanted it to stay until midnight. That was one easy
thing we could change to help the end user out. It's one of those value-add
things where they have the confidence they can reach out and we can solve a
simple issue.

Brian: The product that they bought
isn't just off-the-shelf, set-it-and-forget-it. It's customized to what they
want. When we're adding sound effects and music and light shows, if a customer
wants a particular fight song for their school, or they want specific colors on
the field that they can just tap a button for — we can do it after the fact.

Making Controls Less Scary

Adam: People sometimes get afraid of
controls because they think it's going to be super complicated, and rightfully
afraid — there are a lot of companies out there that do not do control systems
right. They expect the contractor or the customer to suddenly become an expert.
We've tried to change that paradigm. People don't have to be afraid to purchase
a control system or sell a control system. Some of our sales partners who've
been put in a bad position by other factories or controls companies — they run
the other direction when controls opportunities come up.

Adam: We want to continue to solve as
much as we can at the factory. When you buy a new vehicle, you shouldn't have
to set up the touchscreen control system. Why should you have to set up your
lighting system? Continue to integrate more at the factory, and for the
customer to get more out of their investment — make the 100-foot light tower
cooler and push more functionality. It's going to be a fun few years as this
development speeds up.

Jake: This summer's been pretty
interesting working through all these different projects. Such a high
percentage of our sports jobs now have control systems. And there are some very
large ones with multiple consoles — systems on systems. Big shout-out to our controls
team. I come from a controls engineering background, and industrial controls in
general is a little slow-moving with their development. But stuff like this is
super cool. The user interface is super easy to use — there's no way a customer
can accidentally confuse something.

Adam: When Brian first started
developing this, we said it's got to be easy enough for my grandma to use it.
And she literally just walked by. That was about as ironic as it gets.

Get Us Involved Early

Adam: A couple other things to touch
on — the importance of getting our project engineers, controls engineers, and
product engineers involved in the project as early as possible. Five-minute
conversations, 10-minute conversations, 20-minute webinars can save tens of
hours on the back end. We are very open to supporting specifiers, our lighting
agencies, distributors — get us involved as early as possible.

Adam: I'm working on a local project
here for a race track down the street, and it's going to be very cool when it's
done. We were able to get in super early, and between brainstorming control
systems and everything else, you can just make the project run so much
smoother. A lot of factories don't always offer that, but we absolutely do. Get
our project engineers involved and we're happy to help.

Adam: Thanks to Brian and Ryan and
Tyler and Jake's team. I think we have a just a great system developed. It's
still day one in my book when it comes to this control system. There's so much
cool stuff we'll be able to add over time. It comes down to new communities and
the mass market being able to have professional-grade stuff while being able to
afford it. Part of that is making it easy. We know light poles, we know
brackets, we know lighting, we know lighting design, we know control systems.
We can help with the footing side, the structural side. Getting WiLL involved
is always a great move. Thank you very much, guys.