Some of you may have read our recent news article about the Digital Wayfinding system for the Novotel London West Hotel which we installed last year. Whilst digging through our photo archives to find some pictures of the system in action for the case study on our website, we came across some photos we took during testing in our office. If anyone left their desk for too long during that week, there was a good chance their screen would go missing!

The Wayfinding solution for Novotel was quite complex - 32 meeting rooms spread across a large hotel, with 13 wayfinding screens in the lobby and in hall ways, plus several other marketing and general information screens. Staff in the Hotel needed an easy to use interface to allow them to add clients and bookings in advance and each of the wayfinder screens had to be programmed to only show meetings and directional signage for the rooms nearest to it.

Despite the complexity of the requirements, the actual processing requirements for the screens themselves was fairly low. Each meeting room and wayfinder displays a web page which is refreshed several times a minute. A central MediaCAT player not only provides the web-interface for managing bookings, but serves the content for each of the wayfinder and meeting room displays through its on-board web server. By keeping the solution simple, we were able to use our very low-power MC100 MediaCAT Digital Signage Players which not only cost very little to run and stay cool, but are also small enough to fit into the tightest spaces.

In hindsight, the biggest mistake we made on this project was not ordering 50 short network cables in advance - it took us ages to make all of these up! The other thing we learnt was that if you switch on 50 switched mode power supplies at the same time, the combined in-rush current is enough to trip the RCCB in the fuse box - we weren't popular with everyone else in the office when we found that one out!

The MC100 is an ideal digital signage player for special projects like this - despite only having a 600MHz processor it can still display complex web pages, play videos and run simple slide shows and basic text tickers in portrait or landscape mode. With no processor fan and solid state storage, there are no moving parts and in fact these enclosures are completely sealed - which makes them ultra reliable. Although for this solution all content is kept on the central MediaCAT, each player has a good chunk of storage space too - there is almost a Terabyte of solid state storage in these pictures!

One of our biggest concerns was whether or not a standard MC400 MediaCAT player would be up to the job of handling all the requests from the wayfinders and meeting rooms screens - if it wasn't we'd have to have installed one of our Xen Platforms for the central server. Whilst the user-interface is very easy to use, it provides a lot of control over which rooms a wayfinder should show, additional static signage, logos for clients etc. All of this information is held in an SQLite database, which is file based and the SQL queries used by the wayfinder and meeting room screens were quite complex, so we weren't sure how well the system would cope.

However, we shouldn't have worried - in testing we created over 10,000 booking entries in the database and set the refresh times on the screens to a few seconds and the central MediaCAT barely broke a sweat - in fact we had it playing videos at the same time as serving all of the other screens without any affect on either the video playback or the screen updates.

The system has been running perfectly at Novotel London West for over three months now, with some very heavy usage and despite tweaking the user interface to add a few extra features for the staff, we've not had to touch the system at all - which makes the day spent making 50 network cables worth it!

If you would like to find out more about how MediaCAT can help your organisation, please visit the MediaCAT website at www.navaho.tv .