Smart Lighting enables municipal authorities to easily configure and monitor their lighting networks. It gives them the ability to change on/off times and gives the potential to dim the lights at certain times reducing energy consumption and thus reducing their carbon footprint.
Adding sensors to monitor the lamp's performance also gives the operators the ability for proactive maintenance, which reduces running costs significantly. Blown bulbs can be detected without the need for visual inspection and current consumption measurements can predict lamp failures before they happen.
Case Study:
Our experience involves a customer that was interested in the cost benefits of Smart Lighting and we helped design a solution that fit in with their requirements. The project included a design for a wireless lamp node that would connect to other lamps in a mesh network topology and a concentrator that aggregated the control and monitoring functionality for all of the lamps in a subnet and communicated with a central server.
The wireless lighting nodes were designed separately from the high voltage lamp control electronics so that they could easily be retrofitted to a number of existing luminaire designs. The solution required an external antenna to allow a good RF signal and avoid interference from the lamp itself. The nodes were powered from the lamp's supply allowing the RF module to continuously receive commands from the concentrator, rather than having to power down and wake up occasionally.
The concentrator was designed to store the lighting activation profiles for each of the lamps and store the lamps data ready to be sent back to the central server. A GSM link was used to relay the control information from the server to the concentrator and return the sensor data back to the server. A simple user interface was created to set up the server lighting profiles and monitor the status of the lamps.