Controls

  The Design Lights Consortium (DLC) has released their draft of v5.1 Networked Lighting Control technical requirements (NLC5.1). NLC5.1 is a minor revision that contains updates to the policy’s energy monitoring and cybersecurity requirements. There will not be a delisting associated with the policy. Existing listed v5.0 NLC will continue to be DLC listed. Energy Monitoring Updates: [...]

  The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a voluntary cybersecurity labeling program for wireless consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products, including lighting, on March 14, 2024. The program is called the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark Program and it is designed to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions, as well as incentivize manufacturers to meet higher [...]

By Clifton Stanley Lemon and David Shiller LightNOW published the story, Here Comes The Lighting-HVAC Integration Tsunami, on October 6th 2023. It generated a number of responses, including the beginning of a longer conversation with LightNOW contributor Clifton Stanley Lemon. The salient points of that conversation are below. Clifton What jumped out at me immediately [...]

  Guidehouse has published their assessment of strategy and execution for 10 nonresidential lighting controls manufacturers. Guidehouse excluded residential / consumer (only) companies, and also excluded manufacturers primarily focused on smart streetlights or building automation systems (BAS) that don’t focus on lighting controls. Guidehouse Insights Leaderboard profiled, rated, and ranked the following Top 10 lighting control [...]

While building automation systems (BAS) have been around for a while, their capabilities are expanding. Here are 10 trends in building automation systems: 1  Growth The global building automation market size is expected to more than double over the next 9 years. It’s expected to hit USD $205 billion by 2032, up from USD $93 billion [...]

  The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) has announced that Wi-Fi HaLow is ready for smart home and commercial IoT deployments across a range of verticals and use cases. Wi-Fi HaLow is designed for long-range and low-power connectivity and is based on the 802.11ah standard. The WBA has released a white paper that provides an overview [...]

By Scott Sherwood and David Shiller Power over Ethernet (PoE) lighting emerged from the IT industry, which built upon technology from the 48VDC telecom industry. More on PoE lighting origins can be found here. In 2023, PoE lighting had a rough year with significant players going out of business, diminishing in market presence, as well [...]

    By John Arthur Wilson and David Shiller This is the third of a four article series about important concepts in wireless networked lighting controls (NLC). This article is largely about mesh, so let’s start with a definition: A mesh network is a local area network, with a communications arrangement (aka topology) in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. controllers, sensors, switches, [...]

The WiFi Alliance has officially finalized WiFi 7, aka 802.11be. WiFi 7 enabled laptops will have data rates between 4.0 to 5.8 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Wi-Fi 7 operates on the same 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands, so it’s backward compatible with previous Wi-Fi standards. But while older devices can still connect to Wi-Fi 7 [...]