Acharmingly lit billboard almost always lights up your heart. But it is not simply about aesthetics. Dozens of wires make this magic happen.

And the whole appeal gets lost if the illumination blinks, blips or goes off. For people involved in the business of billboards, it is a major issue that can turn into a point of conflict as well. Now a company called Emerging Technologies promises to put an end   to all these problems with its illumination monitoring equipment.

Emerging Technologies has introduced a new product – Hoarding Illumination Monitoring system (HIM) – to solve the problems associated with the monitoring of lighted billboards. According to the company officials, the product is a micro processor- based embedded system. The product also has a communication unit. And the battery –backed equipment is connected to all illumination sources. Every single monitoring product could be connected to as 90 light sources. As the equipment weighs only 400 grams and occupies just 8X6 inches of space, it is not difficult to accommodate it in any kind of hoarding. The high-end version has 96 digital inputs, 16 digital outputs and 5 timer control systems.

As the equipment is connected to all light sources, illumination failure gets recorded in a detailed manner. And it is possible to detect how many lights have failed as well as the exact duration of such failure. What is more, the communication unit in the equipment could send messages of the failure to multiple sources. The messages are sent in the form of SMS and any message could be escalated to different levels with programmed time lags.

For instance, any failure could first get reported to the maintenance staff or agency and then escalated to a higher level later in case no action has been taken at the first level.

“The advantages of the product are obvious. To begin with, the media owner could generate a bill that has no scope for any further interpretation. This leads to a win-win situation where the media owner can be assured of his income and the advertiser could breathe easy. In addition to settling the accounting issues once and for  all, the monitoring product could also come in handy in carrying out timely maintenance and repair,” points out Raj Parmar Chief Executive Officer, Emerging Technologies.