Headworx

Let's take a break from the heavy DALI issues series for a while. I did a lot of travel in the past 2 weeks (and a half). First it was LEDucation - the best lighting trade show in New York, followed by factory visits in China and the Bluetooth Asia event in Shenzhen. Was about to return home but then chasing an important business development I ended up detouring home through Australia. As always tons of lessons and experiences. I love being close to customers, as this really helps get down to Earth and understand their contexts, motivations, and - most importantly - what we should be doing to address them well. Also being a global traveler  has increasingly made me sometimes too confident. Take China - once you travel there once or twice, it becomes really easy to navigate there. And as everything is so overwatched (cameras everywhere!) and therefore safe, your vigilance drops. And this was the case when I ended up in Shenzhen / Shekou ferry terminal. This ferry is BTW super conve...

In episode one of the series I discussed the polarity of the DALI bus. Episode two was about application controllers. And episode three about what DALI-2 really is. This fourth episode of DALI misconceptions is about energy data. DALI drivers can report energy data. This is covered by the Part 252 specification. Most people refer to this as measured energy. DALI is digital, so must be precise. A driver reports the energy consumption so it must measure it, right? Wrong! Firstly, DALI Part 252 only defines the protocol and the data points. it does not say anything about accuracy of the data. This depends on the manufacturer, and some of them specify how accurate the reported values can be and some don't say anything. DALI Part 252 is definitely not a utility-grade data. It can be good for general estimates and definitely having the values available directly from the driver is a nice thing. But just because it is digital, you cannot assume anything about how accurate the values are...

In previous DALI myth busting episodes I covered the DALI bus polarity and DALI application controllers. This time we are going to the heart of it all: what is DALI-2 (and what it is not). This, on one hand, is the easiest one. On the other hand it is very rarely that people really know and understand what the DALI-2 logo means. There are many myths (and unfortunately many being repeated by AI assistants). Like : DALI-2 delivers device power over the DALI bus. Or control devices (see the previous post for details) are only standardized by DALI-2. This is all not accurate. As a matter of fact we could say there is no such thing as DALI-2. At least not a DALI-2 specification. Because a DALI-2 logo on a product means just one thing: the product passed DALI tests and has been certified. Practically this means the DALI organization made the best effort to ensure this product follows the specification and will interoperate nicely with other products that carry DALI-2 logo. DALI-2 does not s...

In the previous myth-busting episode on DALI I covered the polarity aspect of the DALI bus. That is: in theory it is polarity-free (it does not matter which cable goes where as far as the DALI line cables are concerned), and it practice the polarity matters (remember to connect DA+ to DA+ and DA- to DA-). This week I'd like to talk about DALI application controllers. DALI in principle has the concept of "control gear" and "control devices and application controllers". Again, the name (especially the distinction between a "gear" and a "device" is not intuitive. So lets try that: a gear is a driver. A device is a sensor or an application controller. The technical difference is much clearer. Drivers never transmit any data on their own. Only in response to a query command. Devices do the opposite - they send data on their own. So an application controller can send a dimming command to a driver. Or an occupancy sensor can send data whenever it d...

The DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface) standard has had a very uphill battle in the USA. Lots of resistance, mostly quoted to it being problematic and expensive. On the other hand DALI has almost 100% market share in Europe and similarly in Asia and Middle East. DALI Alliance has been trying to change this, addressing the North American market with several campaigns, but they have not been too successful so far. And the reason is, despite DALI being a very good technology, there are many misconceptions, false myths, contradictory statements (even by the DALI people themselves). Here I'll address some key concepts that people often get wrong or are falsely propagated even by those who should know in the first place. DALI is polarity free. I have heard this so many times. Even from the founding fathers of DALI. So yes, in principle it is, but in practice it is not. DALI bus signaling works by shorting the bus. There are two wires and there is small DC (around 18V) current ...

Fast forward 20 years and the old battery drain problem is still with us. Perhaps the consequences are even more annoying, as we rely on battery-powered devices (phones) 24/7. In 2006 it was Windows Vista. Now it is iOS. I rarely use flight entertainment systems, turning to my own screen most of the time during flights. My go-to app is YouTube in offline mode. During regular office days I flag various videos as "watch later" and have the app setting to have them downloaded in the background, so they can be watched offline. This worked for me well for many years. But recently (I think I first noticed this in January this year) my phone started draining the battery very fast in flight. Looking here and there I traced down the problem to the YouTube app. Yes it was draining the battery very fast. So fast that the phone was becoming quite hot, which was unusual for an iPhone. Have tried different solutions, playing with a number of YouTube app settings and nothing has really wor...

My recent effort to cut down noise that manifests as a continuous avalanche of notifications on a phone has been quite successful. The phone is mostly silent, the watch does not vibrate and the earbuds do not interrupt audiobooks to play announcements. I only get a handful of "beeps" per day and they only come from a couple of selected contacts and apps I really do care about. Apps generally abuse the notifications mechanisms in a big way. Rendering the notifications' mechanism practically useless. So I went through all of them, disabling notifications and also making sure they use location services only when an app is active / in the foreground. What was not immediately obvious to me, was that the functionality of an app to stay connected over Bluetooth to an accessory (such as a watch) depends on the "location" permission to be "always". It does not explicitly say "Bluetooth", but iOS ties Bluetooth access with "location". My par...