
Tom Best talked to us about how we helped with the Gemini Carnival Club’s Carnival Cart.
Tell us a bit about yourself Tom?
I live in Somerset and work as an Electrical Design Engineer. I served an apprenticeship with Numatic in Chard and was there for a few years before moving on to new challenges. In my spare time I am involved with Gemini Carnival Club, a Somerset Carnival Club – we build a carnival cart every year and tour the Somerset carnival circuits with it.
How long have you dealt with Lamonde?
I’ve known of and dealt with Lamonde since about 2017, historically, I’ve used their Weintek HMIs, however, I was aware that they offer other products as well, such as drives.
How did Lamonde help you? Tell us about your application?
For the 2023 season Gemini Carnival club have transitioned to a feature cart for our entry in the Somerset Illumined Carnivals. This involves incorporating mechanical movement onto our carnival cart, which cart is 100ft long, 11ft wide and 15ft tall and it incorporates its own 3 phase diesel generator. I contacted Duncan at Lamonde Automation to discuss the possibility of using Control Techniques (CT) drives on our cart and he happily accepted our challenge.

We used three CT Commander S drives coupled with Leroy Somer 1.5kW gear motors. The drive setup process was extremely simple, I downloaded the CT Marshal App onto my phone, entered in the details from the motor plate, selected the control type we required (start, stop & inch push buttons) and then downloaded the configuration to the drive by just touching my phone to the drive using the innovative NFC (Near Field Communication) connection. We had the motors commissioned and operating as we required within 60 seconds.



The Marshal App also came in very handy for fault finding - instead of the classic error code on a drive and then thumbing through hundreds of pages in the manual for the error code, all you do is touch your phone to the drive and read faults from the drive, a history of faults is given to you in plain English. This is perfect for us as we're often out in the rain with no internet signal, however with the exception of one wire coming loose between the motor and the drive we have not had to use this feature or had any issues at all with the drives, they have been extremely reliable which is very impressive when you consider the harsh environment that they are operating in - electrically speaking with the LED lighting and sound system running, they are running on a very dirty source of power, our power factor is poor. The cart is powered by a generator, and the voltage can fluctuate massively, additionally, there is a lot of vibration as we drive the cart all over Somerset between the various carnivals, in spite of these challenges, the Commander S drives have performed brilliantly throughout our circuit and will be used for years to come on our future entries.

On behalf of Gemini Carnival Club I would like to thank Lamonde Automation, with their support, we have entertained an estimated 350,000+ people around Somerset over the course of our 11 carnivals
Thank you for your time Tom, have you started planning next-year’s cart yet?
We’ve got some plans in place, however, unfortunately of bigger concern to the club is that we have been served notice to leave our current build site, so we’re currently looking for an alternative site where we can have our club's build workshop. Watch this space.