Open Standard Wireless LED Drivers

We have talked a lot about Bluetooth NLC since the launch of the standard in September 2023. There are many dimensions impacted by this latest wireless lighting control standard. And the importance of it has already been correctly recognized by the policy makers and global market players world wide.

There have been good interviews - with Bluetooth SIG's Damon Barnes and myself published - which I believe do a very good job explaining what Bluetooth NLC is and how it impacts connected lighting.

DesignLights Consortium (DLC) has recently released a request for proposals for consultants to help define a clear pathway to adopting connected lighting for energy efficiency programs in North America. They nail the problem, which was the short term thinking in the past:

In many present lighting retrofit projects, the extremely low cost of incentivized uncontrolled LED lighting is a major deterrent to networked lighting control (NLC) adoption. If uncontrolled LED lighting had no incentives, then the incremental cost would be smaller to add incentivized NLC, thereby achieving more energy savings.

And then they indicate the technology path forward:

use drivers with standardized digital dimming signals such as ANSI C137.4/D4i or integrated Bluetooth NLC

Which simply means: future-proof your lights by using standardized wired or wireless digital drivers:

• A D4i LED driver offers the option of adding a plug-and-play standardized sensor/controller to the luminaire. There is a good video explaining these options, which I recorder for the LpS DIGITAL conference in 2020.
• An even more cost effective (and easier to expand in future) option is an integrated Bluetooth NLC driver. Such drivers, instead of using an external wired DALI bus to talk to sensors, natively uses Bluetooth NLC to form a wireless mesh network, interface to sensors, interact with scene selectors / dimming controls and report both energy usage and diagnostic data.

Future-proofing in both cases is achieved by using standardized digital drivers for the retrofit luminaires to enable easy upgrades to a network lighting control system at any time in future. 

Digital drivers have been very successful in Europe - practically DALI/D4i has 100% market share there. Integrated Bluetooth NLC drivers are a novelty, but the initial ramp-up, primarily led by Inventronics (previously Osram), has been very promising.

The beauty of standardized Bluetooth NLC wireless drivers is that system expansion does not even require touching the luminaires in the ceiling. Sensors can be added independently, and a simple smartphone app is all that is needed to mesh them together. That is especially attractive when independent energy harvesting Bluetooth sensors and switches are added. Also - if needed - the same smartphone app can be used to upgrade the drivers' firmware - adding the latest software features.

Last but not least: Bluetooth NLC includes, by design, all necessary cybersecurity countermeasures. The standard is open, so has been scrutinized by many independent security researchers. And security in Bluetooth NLC is mandatory. Which is a yet another "checkbox" automatically filled on the list of things to think of.