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 [...]

By John Arthur Wilson and David Shiller This is the second of a four article series about important concepts in wireless networked lighting controls (NLC). What Is A Gateway? A gateway is a hardware device that connects two networks with different protocols. Two common examples that most people are familiar with are WiFi routers and [...]

By John Arthur Wilson and David Shiller This is the first of a four article series about important concepts in wireless networked lighting controls (NLC). John Arthur Wilson is an educator for wireless NLC systems. This first article is about wireless integration versus networking performance. Addressability Types To properly understand the variety of wireless NLC [...]

  A different kind of lighting show has been quietly growing. Lightapalooza will be holding its 3rd annual conference & trade show, February 26-29, 2024, at the Renaissance Phoenix Glendale Hotel & Spa, in Glendale, AZ. The event is organized by the Home Technology Specialists of America (HTSA), a national association of specialty retailers and [...]

  An interesting article by Trane lays out the basics of Building Automation System (BAS) communications and then addresses four common misconceptions. We should first define the protocols and mediums. Protocols are the language in which the building is speaking—BACnet® over MS/TP, BACnet over IP, Modbus, and LonTalk are some of the non-proprietary languages used [...]

  Clifton Lemon Associates today announced that Pacific Gas & Electric will present a free webinar on the growing importance of building controls integration in the process of building-grid connection, load management, decarbonization, and electrification. Titled Lighting and Smart, Grid-Integrated Buildings, the webinar presents a history and overview of building controls integration in both commercial [...]

  Li-Fi utilizes light (typically infrared), instead of WiFi radio waves, to provide blazing fast, secure, wireless connectivity. There has been some Li-Fi adoption by military organizations around the world, but generally, overall adoption has been very slow. That may be about to change. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has been writing about a new [...]