Intelligent Lighting - Construction

Construction

Intelligent fixtures usually employ compact arc lamps as light sources. They use servo motors or, more commonly, stepper motors connected to mechanical and optical internal devices to manipulate the light before it emerges from the fixture's front lens. Examples of such internal devices are:

• Mechanical dimming shutters used to vary the intensity of the light output. Mechanical dimmers are usually a specially designed disk or a mechanical shutter. Shutters with high speed stepper motors can be used to create strobe effects.
• Color wheels with dichroic color filters used to change the color of the beam.
• Variable, incremental Cyan, Magenta and Yellow color-mixing filters to vary beam color via subtractive color mixing. Using this method, a much wider range of colors can be created than is possible using single color filters.
• Automated lens trains used to zoom and focus the beam; irises are used to change the size of the beam. Some fixtures have as many as 10 independently controlled prisms and lenses to focus and shape the beam.
• Pattern wheels with gobos and gate shutters to change the shape of the beam or project images. Some fixtures have motors to rotate the gobo in its housing to create spinning effects, or use their complicated lens systems to achieve the same effect.
• Automated framing shutters to further shape the beam and control unwanted spill.

These fixtures also use motors to enable physical movement of the light beam by either:

• Pivoting an automated mirror which reflects the beam along X & Y axes, or
• Attaching the entire fixture lens train to a yoke with motorized pan & tilt

Note that fixtures which use the former method are not technically “moving heads”, since the light source itself does not move. However, the term “moving head” is used interchangeably throughout this article.