The project features the development of a personalized lighting control system that uses a CSRMesh network as the communication medium. The system focuses on cost-effectiveness, users’ behavior, and preferences allowing to adjust the system for different departments and collect some statistical information.

Challenge

The customer had an obsolete system for the lighting control, so they needed a modern IoT solution based on wireless technologies that delivers a high level of personalized lighting.

Solution

Elinext team has been developing the firmware for three different devices of the system:

1) A badge for employees, that notifies the system when an employee comes in and out:

• Based on CSR1010
• Low energy consumption
• Uses BLE to communicate with the dimmers

Currently, the team is working on the apps for Android and iOS to replace badges and save on costs.

2) A dimmer that controls the lights and reacts on the corresponding badges around:

• Based on CSR1010
• Uses CSRmesh network to communicate with each other
• Configurable behavior according to departments
• Accumulates statistics on the latest seen badges
• Updates over the air

3) A gateway that communicates with dimmers and executes the commands of the system’s admin:

• Based on Raspberry Pi model B
• Communicates with dimmers over BLE
• Accumulates statistics from dimmers
• Able to get a current state of any dimmer from the mesh (f.e. current light level)
• Has a simple webserver to be reached over the web to execute any commands
• Reachable over telnet to execute the same set of commands as for web

Specific features

The team implemented the BLE mesh solutions which are quite a new realm – for example, the CSRMesh network had appeared earlier than BLE 5 specification was issued.

Results

As the result, the customer has got a personalized wireless lighting control system with every element of IoT architecture being flexible enough to add new functions upon request.

In the future, the system can be adapted for some additional functionalities for a smart office such as:

• Heating control
• Security system
• Automating doors control

Also, the team is working on the Android and iOS apps for employees as a replacement for hardware in order to reduce the cost of the system