How do smart lighting companies become the ultimate winners in the market?

LED semiconductor lighting network news "How should I turn on a light?" You might think that this problem is too simple - "press the switch, or pull the light rope to complete." And slowly conclude, our problem is still carry on.

If you wake up in the middle of the night and don't want to get out of bed and look for the switch, how do you turn on the light? Yes, we already have a solution - install a wireless remote control light.

Next, what if you want to save some electricity bills and keep the lights off when the ambient light is bright or no one? It's not difficult to add an ambient light sensor and a voice-activated sensor. When you want to turn on the light, you can cripple or cough in the dark.

If we still hope that this light can be remotely controlled - as far as one kilometer away from the room, it can be timed and switched, and can also change different brightness and color according to the user's needs. It is best to be able to sense the environment automatically and better control the voice. To manage more than one light at the same time... How should such a light be turned on? I am afraid there is only one answer - smart lighting.

The reason why intelligent lighting can meet the above long list of requirements is nothing more than three keywords. The first word is “ LED ”, and only this solid-state lighting method can minimize energy consumption and achieve “color matching” of the light. The second word is “wireless interconnection”. Lights and lights can be networked and interconnected, communicate with each other, transmit status information and control commands, and can be deployed quickly without additional infrastructure investment such as wiring. The third word is “cloud”. The local lighting network accesses the cloud through the gateway, completes data analysis and processing, accumulates relevant knowledge bases, and continuously expands functions to make the lights more intelligent.

Along this complex "open" model, there are many star items on the market, Philips' Hue, Lenovo's LIFX, maverick Ilumi, and more and more followers. If these products have already poked the user's pain points, it is a bit of a sentimental situation. The price of dozens of dollars determines that they are still toys in the hands of geeks. Therefore, they are more like missionaries of intelligent lighting "concepts", telling us that intelligence What is lighting and what can be done, not the final answer we want. If smart lighting really enters the civilian lighting market, it will take some time, and its entry into commercial lighting may be more direct. According to the US Department of Energy, in 2013, lighting electricity accounted for more than 20% of commercial electricity consumption. For enterprises, this is a cost that hopes to be reduced, so commercial lighting is expected to become a bridgehead for the smart lighting market.

Before the market offensive began, the “grain” of technology was ready. From the core chip level, LED-related power management devices have already polished the price/performance ratio in the baptism of market competition. In terms of master MCUs, there are already many chips that integrate rich resources such as MCU core, on-chip memory, ADC, peripherals and RF transceivers, such as JN514x of NXP, Si202x/3x of SiliconLabs, and Texas Instruments CC430F61xx, etc. This makes complex intelligent lighting design simple.

The choice of wireless protocol may be the place where developers are most troubled at present. ZigBee, BLE, WiFi and other technologies are staged in the field of intelligent lighting. And powerful manufacturers can stand in the multi-party and bet at the same time. For example, Avnet has launched a variety of solutions based on ZigBee and BLEMesh with its broad product line.

Still returning to the question at the beginning of the article "How to turn on a light", the emergence of intelligent lighting seems to complicate the problem. If anyone can make it simple, finally give the user a simple answer (product or program) and let everything look like "Press the switch" is as simple as it is - even simpler - he will be the ultimate winner. Because the development of human society, in this way from simple to complex, and then return to a simple reciprocating cycle, it continues to spiral upward.