Teknoware, a Finnish company which manufactures interior lighting systems for buses, coaches and railways, will display a prototype of next generation rail car lighting controller in the Railtex exhibition, London, UK. The purpose for the system is to simplify installation, while adding features which improve passenger comfort and lower maintenance costs. The prototype is designed in co-operation with Linet.

The system body is a seat lights controller. The seat light switches are located in seats' armrests, which have traditionally made such systems very complex and laborious to install. As Linet network is used to transmit information from and to the switches, there is now only a single twisted pair cable shared between switches and lights, and a power cable to lights.

The system also reports broken lamps by indicating on an user interface the location of the lamp which needs to be replaced, passes call-button information to hostess, and includes a master switch to switch on and off all seat lights simultaneously. Even more features could be added, such as 'reserved seat' -display or dimmable seat light, with low additional cost.

The Linet controller, equipped with an LCD display and some pushbuttons, operates as the user interface to the staff. It can be also used to form a link between the system and a train-wide network, e.g. RS485.

The exhibition will be held in Earls Court Exhibition Centre, London, 30/11 to 2/12/1999. For more information about the exhibition, please see http://www.railtex.co.uk. Concerning the product, please contact
Linet Oy, Kalevi Härkönen, e-mail: kalevi.harkonen@linet.fi, tel +358 9 4774 0089, or
Teknoware Oy, Jari Tabell, e-mail: jari.tabell@teknoware.fi, +358 3 883 020. 
 

About the companies: Teknoware Oy manufactures interior lighting systems for buses, rolling stock and emergency lighting systems for public buildings. More information about the company is available at http://www.teknoware.fi. 

Linet Oy is a privately held company committed in developing and marketing the Linet network. Products available from Linet are the network chipset and design services. Linet, 'the light network', is an innovative local operational network offering easiest design, set-up and administration in such simple network applications as home automation, data acquisition systems or small-scale industry automation. The Linet network is patented in the USA and Finland, other patents are under pending. 
 

Linet Oy, 13th October 1999