What does the term ‘open protocol’ really mean? It is an operating platform that is not proprietary.
In today’s world of emerging technologies the open protocol approach should become the standard by which all control systems are based. There are so many of these emerging technologies either on the market now – or soon to be- that offer tremendous features from a performance and/or functionality standpoint. However, the proprietary operating or control systems that are inherent to most (if not all) of these products are a weak link and ultimately a sales deterrent.
Let’s talk lighting and lighting control systems. From what I see there are plenty of great solutions available already, but the biggest problem is that there isn’t one solution that addresses all the different applications in the market place.
A large manufacturing facility is a good case in point. In these facilities you will most likely have high bay areas for manufacturing, shipping and receiving etc , office areas the demand completely different types of lighting and controls and then there is the site itself. Since there isn’t one particular light fixture that can do and effective and efficient job of lighting all of these different areas it is obvious that a hybrid solution needs to be implemented.
For this particular application I know of a super LED high bay fixture that would do a killer job in the manufacturing area. This product is totally unique to the market today in the sense that each fixture comes equipped with its own occupancy sensor and watt meter and the abilities to dim from 0-100% on a per fixture basis! This is pretty crazy when you think about it. We did a lighting layout and cost analysis with this product for a rather large manufacturing area, and despite the fact that these fixtures are pretty expensive we were able to achieve a payback of under three years because of the granularity of control we had with this product. The customer had us layout out the entire facility for 100 foot-candles of light – which is a lot- regardless of the existing use of the space. The business was growing so fast that what might be storage areas today could be manufacturing spaces in a few months, so they needed to be able to achieve 100 fc of lighting in these spaces when needed without going through a major lighting system change over.
With this product it was a piece of cake. Once the grid layout was established we could carry it over into the storage areas, shipping and receiving and any other spaces that weren’t manufacturing and simply set the ‘occupied’ lighting levels to 30 – 50 fc depending on the area and the ‘unoccupied’ light levels too much lower or completely off in areas that were totally unoccupied. However in the manufacturing areas that demanded the 100 fc of lighting, they had all the light they needed and when the machine operators went to lunch or to perform some other task while their programmed machine was doing its thing the light levels would dim to 30 fc automatically. When the storage space was converted to manufacturing all the customer had to do was get on his laptop computer and change the programmed occupied and unoccupied levels to the ‘manufacturing’ state and they were now at 100 fc and 30 fc respectfully.
The controls for these fixtures travel over a zigbee wireless system that appears to be the norm for these types of wireless control systems - which brings me to my main point of this blog. If we move into the office areas and install let’s say a linear LED solution, we could implement a wireless control system that operates on a zigbee platform similar to our LED high bay system to control these fixtures.
Now the big drawback here is not the lighting solutions themselves, it’s the fact that we would have to provide the customer with two separate wireless control systems because- although both solutions operate over a zigbee wireless network the two solutions are stuck in their own little private Idaho and won’t communicate with each other!
Why would the customer want to invest in two completely independent lighting control systems that both come with set up and commissioning costs as well as the token yearly support fees simply because the two different manufacturers whose solutions both utilize the zigbee wireless mesh control system won’t talk to each other?
My point is simple- the manufacturers of the innovative emerging technologies need to let their guard down and realize that they are potentially blocking themselves from larger projects that need to incorporate multiple solutions- simply because they won’t release their products with an open protocol operating system. Their products get pigeon-holed into specific applications because of this and potential sales are affected.
Does the VHS vs. Beta ring a bell???????
