Lourdes 2026: a control room for 100 experts, set up in two days

For the visit of Pope Leo XIV to Lourdes on 26 and 27 September 2026, a temporary control room brings together about a hundred experts: SAMU (French emergency medical service), fire and rescue service, army, police, prefecture departments. Around the tables, one island per service. Facing them, two 9-screen video walls, about twenty square metres of display.

At Easy Multi Display, we do not only write software. This time, we put on the work clothes: two days after we arrived, everything was cabled, aligned and driven by touch.

From the HDMI switch to 20 m² walls

The same logic serves the smallest workstation and the largest wall. On the tables, the services’ laptops plug into an HDMI switch from our Eco range. At the back of the room, two monumental walls split into zones, where you change the display scenario with one gesture from a touchscreen.

Everything is driven with CollectivView, our software designed for secure areas and departmental operations centres. It all goes through plain HDMI cables: sources are isolated, then merged, and different services work in front of the same picture.

The tactical case, the heart of the setup

A Teltonika router creates a Wi-Fi network dedicated to the room. It is linked by RJ45 to an Ubuntu server running QuickShare: guests connect to it with an address and send what they have to show to the wall in one click, including their screen. Everything stays in the room, nothing goes to the cloud.

The same router is linked by RJ45 to the video server. That server sees nothing else: no Wi-Fi, no Internet access. Apart from that link, it only does video capture. The separation is total.

To reach the walls, the HDMI signal goes through a pair of extenders over RJ45 cable. The box claims 100 metres; count on 50 metres with a good category 6 cable.

Consumer screens, a French structure

The panels are Xiaomi televisions: a low price for twenty square metres of display. The mounts come from Kimex, a French brand based in Bordeaux: adjustable to the millimetre to align the screens, on wheels, about 4 metres high. Count on 125 kg of structure and about a hundred kilos of screens per wall.

On the distribution side, the receiver converts the RJ45 back to HDMI, then a simple, affordable video wall controller spreads the picture across the 9 screens of each wall.

Three people, two days

Where the schedule allowed four days for the two walls, it took two, with three people. Prepare as much as possible, adapt at the last minute, and put the common good before everything else: it is the same recipe for a permanent or a temporary room.

We will also be in Paris on 30 September, at the seminar dedicated to control rooms, around the panel on the common operational picture.

A control room project, permanent or temporary? Let’s talk · See the typical command room