It is raining and I am arriving at Shopping centre in Pilsen city around 9:00 a.m. It is pretty close to city center and we together with our partner Qelpro company are going to launch our first outdoor lighting of shopping center parking lot. It is an important event for us since this is a fist launch of this kind of customer and Logimic is always attending such important events.
All LED lamps are already mounted on their poles and their IQRF wireless DALI bridges are ready to be connected to wireless mesh radio network. Our control gateway is installed in a technical room and connected to the internet.
Logimic light is a distributed system where a local edge control logic is concentrated on a gateway connected to the cloud performing a global control. Gateway connects LED spots via the IQRF wireless radio mesh network. The control of the street lights is antonomous when the gateway works independently and commands lamps to execute lighting program.
Building wireless mesh network
Our strategy here is to create the wireless mesh network in the real environment. We have IQRF DALI bridge modules in a “bonding mode” when they are waiting for building of the network. In this mode the LED lamp works as any other non controlled lamp. I have to note that IQRF DALI bridge is a low-cost wireles unit mounted inside of each LED lam so you probably cannot recognize controlled and non-controlled lamp in a real.
Building mesh network means one click in our lighting console available via any web browser. For our comfort we use a tablet device where you can log in to our Logimic Light portal and in Gateway section you can trigger any service command.
By activating a Network builder command the gateway builds the network with all available LED lamps at this moment. The IQRF DALI bridge which is the radio transciever is equipped with a specific password for this operation which has to comply with the gateway password. You can build entire network at once or step by step.
Any connected LED light is displayed as a blue spot on the gateway matrix and you can send to that proper commands.
Map localisation
We chose the incremental method so we connect light spots in batches of 10 lamps. After each connection we perform localisation which is short blink of the lamp to determining on which pole it is actually placed. This will helps technicians with exact specification of failures in the future.
We conencted around 90 lamps in batches per 10 pieces. After connection of each batch the gateway always redesigns the mesh network to be maximally optimized. In the mesh network is each spot reachable through one or more neighbourhood spots. The proper routing is important for reliable and robust wireless connectivity of each particular device.
Within couple of hour our work is done and our tablet is displaying a map with all LED lights.
Final adjustement
Finally the lamps are divided into locations per customer requirements. The location is a zone which can be managed independently, e.g. can have independent program. Here we separated lights into three locations with different lighting programs. These programs respect both a night regime of the shopping center and the respect to durability of tle LED panels when activity of lamps is flexibly changed after certain time period to keep lighting hours equally distributed.
Light program is a change of the light intensity during night. It can use time events or Sunrise and Sunset events calculated for a given position of the controlled gateway. The program can be changed or modified anytime with respect to customer needs. The intensity is changed on a linear or logarithmic scale.
Executed lighting program is monitored via backward responses of lights and can be displayed as a statistics.
Conclusion
We designed Logimic Light to be broadly afordable and uintuitive tool for the control ofopen-air lighting. This application shows that on the top of this vision it also offers a quick comissioning and localisation of street lighting. Together with low-cost IQRF DALI bridges we have economy solution for everyday lighting.
