Jurassic Wires

Some people are dinosaurs. Or at least behave like them. It is 2025 and promoting a wired lighting control system feels like you are from a deep past. Makes me wonder how you can still be alive at all?

Bluetooth mesh has been around since 2017 - 8 years and counting. Millions of devices shipped, tens of thousands of commercial buildings deployed, happy customers and users, zero issues.

And you still pitch cables? Arguing one cable system is better than another cable system because it uses less miles of cables drilled in the walls and laid in the plenum? That is definitely the feeling I had listening to otherwise great Lighting Controls podcast episode 83 on DALI.

And don't get me wrong - I LOVE DALI (it stands for Digital Addressable Lighting Interface). Actually I have been very actively participating in development of DALI, particularly working on the DALI-341 specification which links DALI and Bluetooth NLC based on the industry - approved architecture.

For the uninitiated: DALI is a two-wire bidirectional digital communication bus. It is most widely used in LED drivers, using the DALI bus you tell the driver to "dim up" or "dim down" or "turn on" or "off" and you can also read a ton of parameters from the driver: energy consumption, configuration parameters, maintenance data points. There can be multiple drivers sharing the same bus - up to 64.

Then there are "application controllers" - also connected to the bus and commanding the drivers. A Bluetooth NLC sensor-controller (typically embedded into a luminaire) acts as such application controller. The simplest setup is one Bluetooth NLC sensor-controller connected over DALI bus to one driver. But there can be more than one driver (e.g., in a long linear fixture) or a mixture of drivers (standard and emergency with local battery). DALI does a phenomenal job standardizing the way emergency drivers are tested, including the monthly functional tests and yearly duration tests).

The bottom line is: DALI is great when used INSIDE a luminaire. Short bus, a couple of cables, a couple of drivers. Outside the luminaire is fully wireless, using Bluetooth NLC in a wireless mesh topology, with distributed control logic for zero point of failure collectively intelligent system. I blogged a lot on that in the past. 

Surprisingly there are still people alive, who continue using DALI like it had been used in the old days before wireless mesh networks came along. They have a central electrical panel where they install the single point of failure central application controller and they drill the walls to pull miles of cables to the fixtures. And they still argue this is a "better" technology. I feel like watching the Jurassic Park when I listen to them. Unfortunately the DALI Alliance also behaves like a dinosaur, promoting these kind of systems. DALI should really focus on D4i - the "intra-luminaire" subset of DALI which builds on the strengths of the tightly defined standard while aligning it with the leading wireless technologies such as Bluetooth NLC.