Background

Oto takes its name from the Japanese word for sound, and the whole place is built around that idea. Tucked into a ground-floor space at HDR’s headquarters building in Omaha’s Aksarben Village, it is the city’s first hi-fi listening bar — roughly 1,500 square feet given over to vinyl, carefully chosen cocktails and a sound system that people come specifically to hear. Nights run from early evening conversation through to late DJ sets, and the room is expected to feel different at each stage. Everything in the fit-out, from the seating layout to the surfaces on the walls, was chosen with listening in mind. 

JRA, the lighting representative agency covering Nebraska, brought Lumos Controls into the project as the electrical scope was taking shape. A room this small and this deliberate does not have space for control gear that announces itself, and the team wanted the lighting to behave like part of the programming rather than a building service. Devices were configured by the Lumos Controls team ahead of delivery, so the contractor installed rather than programmed. 

Lumos Controls delivered a wireless Bluetooth Mesh solution combining fixture controllers, room controllers, motion-sensing dimmers, multi-button wall controllers and a central gateway. 

Objectives 

• Let the room change character across an evening at the press of a single button 

• Hold low light levels cleanly, without flicker or drift, over long hours 

• Give staff a control interface labelled in the venue’s own terms 

• Automate lighting in service and back of house areas so nobody has to think about it 

• Keep every setting adjustable once the team learned how the space really ran 

Challenges 

Start with the room itself. Fifteen hundred square feet is not much, and almost all of it had already been claimed by acoustics, sightlines to the turntables, and a bar that needed to work fast. There was no appetite for a wall of dimmer plates, no route for control cabling through finished surfaces, and no tolerance for equipment that hummed, buzzed or sat in a sightline. Whatever went in had to disappear into the fabric of the place. 

Light quality mattered more here than in most hospitality projects. A listening bar spends its evening at the dim end of the range, and dimming at the bottom of the curve is where cheap control shows itself — steps you can see, levels that drift, a slight shimmer that nobody can name but everybody notices once they are sitting still and paying attention. Guests at Oto are doing exactly that. 

There was also the practical question of who operates it. Bar staff work with both hands busy and a queue in front of them. Asking a bartender to remember which of twelve unlabelled buttons produces the late-night setting was never going to hold up past the first busy Saturday. And because the venue was new, nobody could say in advance exactly where the evening’s turning points would fall. The programming would need rewriting once real nights had been run. 

Solutions 

Wireless AC powered 8 button switch with custom engraved faceplate – WS-NA0-02-08W 

This is the control the venue actually runs on. Eight buttons, each mapped to a scene, on a faceplate laser-engraved with the venue’s own wording rather than generic numbers — so the person behind the bar presses the label that matches the moment instead of working it out. The switch is AC powered and talks to the network over Bluetooth mesh, which meant it could be sited where the team wanted it, within reach of the service side of the bar, rather than wherever the wiring allowed. 

Wireless 0-10V single channel dimming AC powered room controller – PSC-WCM-450-BLE-WS 

The main lounge and bar areas are handled by room controllers that move a whole zone together. Dimming runs on the 0-10V output and the built-in relay takes care of switching, so a scene change reads as one smooth shift across the space rather than a set of fixtures arriving at different times. Six of these carry most of the venue, which kept the electrical layout compact in a building with very little room to spare. 

Wireless 0-10V dual channel dimming AC powered fixture controller – Radiar AF10 

Some parts of the room needed two layers moving independently — accent light over the record wall behaving differently from the general wash, for instance. The Radiar AF10 provides two separate 0-10V channels from a single controller, giving the designer that separation without doubling the hardware behind the ceiling. Its inbuilt relay handles switching for both channels. 

PSC-DM-I-WS-100-1-button Bluetooth mesh wall controller – PSC-DM-WS-100-BLE-WS

Not every space needs eight options. In the smaller areas around the venue, a single-button controller does the whole job: one press, one preset, nothing to get wrong. These were placed where they made sense to the people using them — by a door, at the end of a run — which is only possible when the switch is not tied to a cable route. 

AC powered PIR motion & light sensor with low bay lens – Cyrus AP 

The sensor covers the part of the building the guests never see. Fitted with a ceiling mount and a low bay lens matched to the height of the space, it brings light up when someone walks in and lets it fall away when the area clears, so storage and service areas are not sitting lit through a whole shift. It also reads ambient light, so on days when the space is set up in daylight the electric lighting only makes up the difference.  

BLE-WiFi gateway with Ethernet & RTC – Enor E 

The gateway is what turned the installation into something the venue could keep shaping. It links the mesh to the Lumos Controls cloud, and its real time clock keeps schedules accurate through power cuts or network drops — useful in a venue whose opening hours shift between weeknights and weekends. Scenes can be re-cut and levels nudged remotely, in the afternoon, rather than by someone crouched over a laptop while the room is full. 

Result 

An evening at Oto now has a shape you can feel. The room opens brighter and more social, settles as the seats fill, and drops into something closer and warmer as the night turns over to the DJ. None of it is announced. Regulars have started describing the place as feeling different late on without being able to say why, which is roughly the highest compliment a lighting scheme can be paid. 

For the staff, the change is that there is nothing to learn. The engraved faceplate reads in plain language, so a new bartender on their first shift can move the room without asking anyone. Presses land instantly and the same press gives the same result every night, which is what makes people trust a control and actually use it. 

The parts of the building that were never meant to demand attention now do not. Back of house lights on arrival, holds while there is someone there, and steps back when the space empties, and it does that without a single instruction from anyone. Over a venue running six nights a week, that is a steady saving nobody has to manage. 

What the team values most is that the scheme is not fixed. Oto is a new venue still learning its own rhythm, and as the programming develops, scenes can be rewritten, timings moved, and fixtures added — all on the existing mesh, with no cable pulled through a finished room. The lighting can keep pace with whatever the space becomes. 

About Our Partner – JRA

JRA is a lighting and electrical representative agency serving Nebraska and the wider region, working across the specification, distribution and contracting community with a curated line card of manufacturers. Its team tends to join projects early, while scopes are still being drawn, and stays with them to the end. At Oto HiFi Lounge, JRA introduced Lumos Controls to the project and supported it from the first conversation through to project sign-off. 

About Lumos Controls

Lumos Controls builds intelligent wireless lighting control solutions for commercial buildings, helping owners and operators create spaces that feel right, run efficiently and stay easy to manage. From bars, restaurants and hotels to offices, schools, healthcare facilities and warehouses, the platform brings lighting, sensors, switches, gateways and analytics together on a single Bluetooth Mesh network. It suits new construction and retrofit alike, cutting installation effort while leaving building teams free to adapt a space as its needs change.