Project Case Studies

Brought on as commissioning engineer for the AV and video infrastructure across a Carnival Excel-class cruise ship — one of the most complex passenger vessels in the world. The starting point was a set of vendor-supplied technical drawings that were supposed to describe a fully functioning ship-wide system.

The vendor drawings turned out to be aspirational rather than accurate. Working through the infrastructure revealed a series of significant engineering problems that needed diagnosing and resolving before the ship could operate.

Signal routing had fundamental inconsistencies — certain inputs simply couldn't reach the outputs they needed to, meaning the matrix wiring had to be re-designed and physically re-patched. Mixed video standards were causing silent failures throughout: 3G-SDI Level A and Level B signals were being fed to devices that could only handle one or the other, and 1080i sources were going to equipment that couldn't decode them. Several devices that required genlock to synchronise with the house reference hadn't been specified with it, creating timing instability across the system.

On the infrastructure side, a portion of the UTP cabling didn't meet the spec needed for reliable signal transport, requiring re-routing and the introduction of signal re-clockers at key points to restore integrity. The NewTek TriCaster setup — used for production switching and NDI-based IP video distribution — required careful configuration and extensive work with the ship's IT department, who had no prior experience of broadcast-grade IP video and needed educating on the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that NDI demands to function reliably on a shared network.

By systematically working through each failure point — re-designing the signal matrix, resolving the standards mismatches, introducing appropriate sync and re-clocking where needed, and getting the network team aligned on QoS configuration — the full AV infrastructure was brought into service. The delivered system was stable, correctly routed, and documented accurately for the ship's technical crew going forward.

Engaged as Design Engineer on a major entertainment cruise ship project for a globally recognised entertainment brand (client confidential). The project required a hardened interlock safety system to govern the firing of onboard fireworks and pyrotechnics — one of the most safety-critical elements of the ship's entertainment programme.

Pyrotechnic systems on a passenger vessel operate under strict maritime safety regulations and require a fail-safe architecture — the system must default to a safe state under any fault condition, and no firing event should be possible unless every safety condition is positively confirmed. The interlock system needed to monitor smoke detection inputs, environmental sensors, and operational states across multiple zones, and inhibit the firing circuit automatically if any safety condition was not met.

The role was specifically hardware design using the Beckhoff industrial control platform — specifying the I/O architecture, safety relay configuration, input monitoring circuits, and physical installation requirements to meet the required safety integrity level. This involved working closely with the safety engineers to ensure the hardware design matched the functional safety specification exactly, with no ambiguity between the design intent and what was physically installed.

The interlock hardware design was delivered to specification and signed off by the commissioning safety team. The system provided reliable, deterministic safety monitoring — ensuring that pyrotechnic firing was only possible when all environmental and operational conditions were positively confirmed safe.

Across multiple cruise ship projects, QSys was deployed not just as an audio DSP platform but as the central integration layer — the system through which all other AV and show control systems communicated. The challenge was to make it work reliably in that role.

Large cruise ships have AV systems from many different vendors across many different departments — lighting, video, audio, show control, building management, and IT infrastructure — all of which need to interact with each other but were never designed as a unified system. QSys, with its Lua scripting environment and broad protocol support, was used as the integration glue between these worlds.

The work involved writing Lua scripts within QSys to handle inter-system communication — triggering events across departments, translating control protocols, and building logic that allowed one system's output to reliably drive another system's input. This required working closely with engineers from different disciplines (audio, lighting, IT, and ship's technical staff) to understand what each system expected, how it behaved under fault conditions, and what the operational team needed to be able to control from a single interface.

Getting departments that typically worked independently to agree on shared control logic — and then making that logic robust enough to survive the realities of a live operational environment — was as much a communication challenge as a technical one.

Delivered integrated QSys environments where previously siloed AV systems could communicate reliably, giving operational teams unified control and reducing dependency on manual coordination between departments. The Lua scripting layer provided a flexible, maintainable foundation that ship's technical staff could understand and build on.