Gemini Carnival Club - Rock Train 2024

I'm Tom Best, a member of Gemini Carnival Club, a voluntary, self fundraised group who create a feature cart to take part in the world-famous Somerset illuminated Carnivals - this involves incorporating mechanical movement onto the carnival cart, which is 100ft long, 11ft wide, 15ft tall and has its own 3 Phase diesel generator.

For the second year running I contacted Duncan at Lamonde Automation to discuss the possibility of using more Nidec Drives (Control Techniques/CT) Commander S drives on our cart, and he happily accepted our challenge.

Last year, 2023 for our "Noah" cart, we used three CT Commander S drives coupled with Nidec Leroy-Somer 1.5kW 50:1 gear motors.

For our 2024 cart, "Rock Train" we added a fourth 1.5kW 50:1 gear motor and four 0.37kW 100:1 gear motors, all controlled by CT Commander S drives. The locomotive and carriage movements being driven by the 1.5kWs and the roof movements by the 0.37kWs.

Setting up the motors and drives couldn't have been easier; in less than 60 seconds we had each one commissioned. Using the Marshal phone app, the data from the motor plate is entered, along with control parameters, these are sent to the drive using NFC by simply tapped the phone on the drive. The Marshal app also came in handy for fault finding, instead of the classic error code on a drive and subsequent thumbing through a manual, all you have to do is tap your phone to the drive with the Marshal app to retrieve fault history in plain English-perfect for us as we're often out in the rain with no internet signal.

This year Lamonde also supplied us with a Weintek cMT X Series HMI (cMT2108X2), fitted with an M02 Wi-Fi module and with the CODESYS licence installed, controlling Weintek's iR Series I/O (iR-ETN40R & iR-AQ04-VI), as well as Teltonika Networks ethernet switches(TSW010). This allowed us to control the Commander S drives, we were able to utilise the power of CODESYS to use the 4-20mA control loops on the drives, this kept the train and roof movements synchronised, and meant that at the end of each carnival we were able to park the mechanical elements for. The Weintek HMI was extremely helpful for fault diagnostics whilst on circuit, also giving us the ability to isolate any section of the cart which had issues.

All the kit provided by Lamonde has been extremely reliable, which is impressive considering the environment they're in, electrically with the LED lighting and sound system running it results in a very dirty source of power, our power factor is poor and as the cart is fed by a generator, the voltage can fluctuate massively, and there is a lot of vibration, in spite of the challenging conditions, the Commander S drives, Weintek HMI, Weintek I/O and Teltonika switches have performed brilliantly and will be used for years to come on our carts.

Gemini Carnival Club would like to thank Lamonde for their support- we've entertained an estimated 350,000+ people around Somerset over the course of our 11 carnivals.