Space Agency Complex and Launch Operations Center Utility Control Room

The Challenge

A world-renowned American spaceport in the Southeast USA has an existing control room space that monitors campus utilities.

The existing video wall was driven by an older video wall controller solution that no longer met government requirements in terms of operating system and warranty. Datapath was chosen to provide a replacement video wall controller that would offer flexibility, while improving the existing hardware and software security.

This launch operations center is a heavily utilized facility managing complex activities for both public and private customers throughout a 219 square mile space port. Due to an extremely tight schedule with limited access to the 200-square mile site, the installation of this Video Wall, Processor and Control System had to be well planned and executed.

The Solution

Datapath worked with the Space Agency's integrator, AV-Worx, to deploy the new video wall controller with minimal interruption to the campus activities.

The VSN1182-RPSU was selected along with multiple Datapath Image graphics cards to support a Christie Digital 10x4 LCD video wall. Primate Technologies provided the real-time control room software for data visualization.

This was a unique control room video wall controller deployment that leverages the data visualization software of Primate Technologies (https://primate-tech.com/index). This low CPU overhead application runs natively on the Datapath controller to create a single window of content across the entire video wall.

Datapath's Greg Dieckhaus, senior sales manager for the region, spoke of the uniqueness of the install: "Datapath hardware and software is used in many of the most secure control rooms in the world. This unique application, where our VSN processing technology works in synergy with third party control software, demonstrates how Datapath products can work in reliable harmony for a successful solution."

The result

With its video processor replaced and the latest graphics cards installed in the Datapath VSN chassis, the Spaceport now has a control room visualization experience that is far superior and more secure than what was previously used.

"After 9 months of planning, and testing the hardware systems to be installed in the Launch Control Center it was all systems go for the installation to commence," said Johannes A. Csonka, CEO at AV-Worx (https://www.av-worx.com/).

"In Conjunction with Datapath, and Primate technologies, our execution plan went flawlessly and the system installation was completed successfully as planned. Due to the complexity of this system and the need for reliability AV-Worx selected Datapath for the Video Wall Processing. "

In praise of Datapath's support, Johannes concludes: "Datapath's knowledge and experience in working with complex hardware for Video wall processing is the reason they were chosen for our project. From start to finish it was a pleasure working with the entire team at Datapath."