Digi Helps Enable British Museum Traffic Management System

The British Museum has announced today its new visitor counting system which uses Connectware Etherlite hardware and software connectivity solutions from Digi International, Inc. (Nasdaq: DGII). The Digi products enable the connection of a series of counting and tracking devices using the museum's legacy Ethernet network.

Visitor counting is essential for institutions like the British Museum, which attracts some 4.8 million people every year and has to be able to provide accurate and reliable counts of visitor numbers in order to continue to attract public funding. Similar counting technology has applications in many other public visitor locations and is also widely utilised by department stores and other retailers.

The British Museum's newly refurbished Great Court has several entrances through which visitors can enter and exit freely, so dozens of sensors and a sophisticated counting system were needed to cover all the permutations.

Specialist customer counting and tracking system provider ShopperTrak was asked to provide a visitor counting system for this unique application. To further complicate the project, wiring for all the equipment needed to be hidden from public view, which meant using The British Museum's in-house network. Although the ShopperTrak system uses RS232/RS425 serial connectivity, it was decided to find a way to run the data over the existing British Museum Ethernet network.

The British Museum project team contacted Digi International UK reseller Entrix Computing for the optimum connectivity solution for this application. Entrix proposed Digi's easy-to-use Etherlite, serial to Ethernet product because the connection is software and bus independent, using the network merely as a transport mechanism and providing seamless and transparent additional "COM" ports on the NT workstation. A test 2-port unit was used to prove the effectiveness of the technology and the whole installation was completed within the required project timescale.

Colin Jones of ShopperTrak said "we were delighted to find that Digi had a product which facilitates the transport of our 'type' of data across Ethernet networks and which adhered to The British Museum's IT standards, enabling us to utilise the existing network. With the success of this project ShopperTrak is now using Digi products as an integral part of our solutions requiring this type of connectivity."