Smart Lighting as a System

Dealing with darkness has come a long way since Edison introduced a stable high vacuum bulb to contain his brightly glowing tungsten filament. Yet, even though light bulbs have since been replaced by much more efficient and versatile LED technology, one thing still holds true today. The reason why Edison’s version became such a huge success? His lightbulbs were part of a much larger system: a power grid. Now history seems to repeat itself, adding wireless communication to the mix.

Smart Lighting

Imagine a building with people in it, none of the people in this building, are the same or fulfill the same role. They embark on different quests in a dynamic environment. Needless to say, the lighting needs vary greatly with time, space and activity. In contrast, today we have passed the ‘one size fits all’ paradigm and adopted a much more tailored mindset in how we perceive our makeable world. Not only does this allow for a much more pleasant experience – in case of lighting you could choose to feel more active or relaxed to better accommodate your mood or activity – in most cases it is also the most efficient approach. In terms of performance and well-being as well as power consumption.

Bright Node Benefits

What would you need to accommodate the ultimate lighting solution? First you would need lighting units that can be controlled in either color or intensity. Secondly, you would need some supervisory intelligence that would tell the light units which setting is required.

This could be a simple time-based routine or a more complex algorithm accounting for numerous variables, possibly with self-learning capabilities. Last but not least, you would need a network to get the messages across and acquire data from the light unit as well as the environment. One way to accommodate the latter would be to set-up a network and connect all the lighting units to it.

A smarter way would be to turn the lighting units into wireless nodes of their own in order to automatically form a self-organizing mesh network. Not only would this eliminate the need for additional power for the network – where there is light, there is power – it would also be fairly easy to locate or even identify people and geographically adjust lighting settings accordingly.

Turning Lighting Smart

Fujitsu does not only partner up with Smart lighting suppliers as part of the eco-system but enables lighting manufacturers to turn their devices smart by using the Fujitsu Mesh radio modules and regular Bluetooth radio modules.

The modules allow remote control of the luminaires.

• • Grouping
• • Daylight compensation
• • Color and intensity control
• • Setting lighting sceneries pending the use of space
• • Light settings based upon occupancy

The FWM7BLZ20W mesh module enables devices with this module integrated to be added to a Wirepas massive mesh network.

The benefit that Fujitsu modules bring is having a 32kHz crystal included, the 32kHz crystal enables the devices to operate in Low Energy Mode.

When designing the lighting fixtures to be part of a mesh network construction, you might want to have the opportunity to add other devices later on or offer the users the option of adding additional IoT solutions in that case having a Low Energy Mode included is a benefit to add-on battery powered devices.

The benefit of adding the Fujitsu Mesh Module is not just turning lighting smart but instantly becoming part of the Wirepas eco-system. The Mesh Module based Smart lighting is one of the options to roll-out a mesh network throughout buildings allowing Asset Tracking, Environmental monitoring, Indoor navigation and more.

Become part of the total solution offered by Fujitsu and eco-system partners.

Wirepas Mesh Technology

One of the technologies that has been specifically developed to support massive distributed and self-organizing mesh networks is Wirepas. With Wirepas, many thousands of nodes can be part of one single network that is both vast and granular at the same time, yet always maintaining its robustness. Nodes can be miles apart or packed tightly together, they are always in touch with their neighbors, determining the optimal route (in terms of integrity, energy efficiency, and speed) for every package they encounter. In the case of a smart lighting system, these packages can contain lighting data, but this is not a prerequisite. In fact, having the smart lighting network in place, it allows to explore other smart information flows such as environmental data or Asset Tracking.

Eco-system

Fujitsu offers a wide variety of IoT Solutions to customers in various organizations in various fields and industries such as hospitals, retail, smart buildings, warehousing and industrial.

Eco-system solutions:

• • Asset Tracking and Management
• • Environment Monitoring
• • Smart Lighting
• • Smart Buttons
• • Dash Board Software
• • Indoor Navigation

Fujitsu offers a special service: we also flash your own firmware to modules in our factory without any additional cost. This saves time and cost at your manufacturing process.