The invention of lighting lamps has illuminated the life of human beings at night, and Revolutionary changes will also happen with traditional lighting lamps entering the new era of the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we will show you how smart lighting will change your life and my life and introduce smart lighting solutions and reference designs from Silicon Labs.
Continuous characteristics of smart lighting for the Internet of Things
Lighting fixtures, from the earliest sources of fuel lighting (gas, candles, oil...) to the later light bulbs, tubes (tungsten wire, halogen, fluorescence...) and to modern LED lighting, have brought about fundamental changes in the source of light, and also improved the quality and luminous efficiency of the source. However, traditional illuminating lamps are usually only designed with two kinds of pure control ability, turning on and turning off, which appears too ordinary and drab in this modern digital life.
Imagine, when you come back home, the relevant lamps will be turned on automatically, and will even turn on based on your life demand, or adjust the brightness and color of many lamps in batches according to the setting scene and time, which make your life more convenient and much more colorful. In addition, when you go out for a long time, the lamps also can follow the set mode, or you can remotely control those lamps to make the lamps at home turn on and turn off automatically, forming the illusion that there is some person living at home, which makes criminals or thieves dare not invade. All this life convenience is created by the smart lighting of the Internet of Things.
At present, the mainstream wireless connection modes of Internet of Things (IoT) include Zigbee, Thread, bluetooth, WiFi and other technologies, among which Zigbee and Thread technologies are particularly prominent in low energy consumption and stability, so they are adopted by many Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and Zigbee and Thread technologies are also adopted in smart lighting to realize the connection and control among lamps.
Silicon Labs has been engaged in the Internet of Things technology for many years, and the EFR32 ™ Mighty Gecko mesh network wireless SoC launched by it recently is an ideal choice of designing energy-efficient wireless connection IoT devices. The EFR32MG in the wireless Gecko portfolio can support Zigbee and Thread wireless connectivity, and such devices also support Bluetooth low power consumption and proprietary protocols of 2.4GHz and sub-GHz. This SoC solution can provide industry-leading energy efficiency, ultra-fast wake-up time, expandable power amplifiers, as well as uncompromising MCU performance function. These devices are suitable for battery powered applications and other systems requiring high performance and low power consumption characteristics.
Features of SoC from the Mighty Gecko series include support for Thread and Zigbee wireless protocols, with excellent reception sensitivity, and also support proprietary 2.4 GHz and Sub-GHz protocols, very suitable for wide area network applications with proprietary protocols, wireless M-BUS and low power consumption, support Bluetooth® low energy consumption technology, being compatible with Bluetooth 5 specifications, and being built-in with rich analog and digital peripherals, including AES-256/128 hardware crypto-accelerators of ECC, SHA-1, SHA-2, as well as ADC, current DAC, voltage DAC, operational amplifiers, low energy sensor interfaces, analog comparators, low energy UART, USART, I²C and timers, as well as counters and so on, with energy-saving and low-power mode. And only 1.4 µA is needed during deep sleep mode, and only 3 µS is needed from EM3 to wake up mode. It supports a range of 1.8-3.8V for wide power supply voltage and it is designed with MCU and memory options with strong functions. It adopts ARM® Cortex®-M4 and floating-point units, with a clock frequency as high as 40MHz, programmable flash memory as high as 1024 kB, and 256kB RAM, with multiple package options including BGA125, QFN68, QFN48 and QFN32.
In order to assist customers to rapidly develop smart lighting products, Silicon Labs launched a number of connected lighting reference designs and demonstration boards. These connected lighting reference designs are considerably stable, can be extended with rich functions, and can support lighting settings of white, color temperature and RGB color, as well as dimming functions. These lamps can be easily connected with other Connected Home reference designs via Zigbee gateway (such as USB virtual gateway or Wi-Fi/Ethernet gateway), for example, the adjustable capacitive touch light switch reference design.
The compact and economical lighting reference design of Silicon Labs is based on the Zigbee 3.0 standard, and can be used by cooperating with the Zigbee 3.0 home automation system. This reference design suite adopts Silicon Labs’s EM3585 (RD-0035-0601), EFR32MG1P732F256GM32 (RD-0085-0401) or EFR32MG12P432F1024GM32 (RD-0098-0401) wireless microcontroller (MCU).
These reference designs adopt the Zigbee Z3ColorControlLight sample application to pre-program, so it can be used out-of-the-box. The lighting reference design module and demonstration board of Silicon Labs Zigbee are designed to show Zigbee lighting applications using EFR32MG or EM3585 Zigbee chipsets. These modules can also be directly integrated into wired lighting applications.
The lighting reference design demo board of Silicon Labs can be demonstrated as a part of the Zigbee network. All Zigbee networks must have a device, such as a gateway, to play the role of coordinator, and allow the debugging of new devices on the network, and it can be connected with existing Zigbee devices so as to evaluate the interoperability with the lighting reference design.
In addition to hardware, Silicon Labs software provides one-click access to Zigbee or Thread wireless SoC design tools, documents, software and support resources. And through precompiled demonstration, application instruction and example, it can be started and operate quickly, and can provide advanced tools, including energy profiling and network analysis, so as to optimize your wireless system, making more rapid product development.
With the popularity of the Internet of Things, smart lighting gradually will walk into every family, so the market potential is very surprising, and it is worthy of positive input by manufacturers so as to seize market opportunities, while Silicon Labs’s EFR32 ™ Mighty Gecko mesh network wireless SoC, connected lighting reference design, as well as demo board will give you a helping hand.
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