Interacting with our LED lighting
Tom Griffiths - Publisher

October 25, 2012...An announcement by a company called GreenWave Reality (yes, really) concerning their IPv6-connected LED replacement lamps triggered some basic questions concerning the whole of LED lighting... Apologies in advance for the company being in the crosshairs here, it's just the combined benefit and disadvantage of coming up with something out of the ordinary on one of my commentary days. At least it's free publicity (our coverage here and their product info here to make advance amends). So the questions that popped into my mind are "How connected should my individual lamp be?" and at a higher level, "How should we be interacting with our lighting?". The bonus question is more about their chosen name, but hey, it's memorable and has great tree-hugging/greentech/postive-waves imagery. Since there likely isn't a schoolyard bully ready to punch them in the nose for being the geeky kid with two last names where first ones should be, they'll probably survive and even prosper for it.

How connected should my individual lamp be? A look at the product info, the release and what people are saying about it makes it clear to me that the product here is less about a solution for everyone's household light bulbs than it is a technology demonstration that's about the connectivity and communications. Wireless mesh networks, which provide the ability for individual "nodes" to (hopefully) seamless interconnect and intercommunicate to the next higher network in the hierarchy are pretty clearly going to be an important component in the next generation of smart-lighting, as well as smart-whatever when it comes to controlling our building-related environments. It comes with a key advantage of the nodes being able to relay information through other nearby nodes, which makes it a bit more robust and helps to avoid the challenge one would find in a situation like my house, where 5 walls stand between the wireless router and the rec room closet. It's part of converted garage that I swear was built as a Faraday cage to specifically prevent WiFi reception for the 40 feet in that direction, while enhancing the reception of my neighbors network 200 feet out the front windows. I wish they'd pop for the higher speed connection though to help speed my teenager's 2 gig game update downloads (heh).

So for real life, other than in association with my chosen industry here, how would the "reality" of the connected bulb technology work for this average consumer? I tend to think not so well. For one, there's those pesky little light switches that we put on table lamps and on the wires leading up to the wall and ceiling fixtures. Much as I find amusement in having owned more than one car that needed special instructions before anyone else could operate it, I personally am thinking "nightmare" as I instruct household visitors (or worse, the housesitter), not to touch any switches unless they've been specifically pre-briefed as to their function and purpose. Nothing un-sells a technology as fast as it being a) complicated and b) frustrating, especially when it claims to be simple. If I push the button to turn on all the lights at o-dark-hundred, they better all come on without having to follow a strict regimen the night before to make sure all wall and lamp switches are flipped on before hitting the remote to turn them all off (which you'd better get done before auto-off deadline triggers the off before you get to make sure they're on). And so far, the only fast, seamless and reliable connection to the WiFi we've experienced is with our iWhatevers, for which Apple has invested no small sum to make it that way. It would be great to see that kind of seamless experience here, and they might very well have it.

There isn't really any information on the lamps (lightbulbs) themselves provided in the product information. We were able to get a helpful response on some data there, and it turns out they are listed with Energy Star under LEELEDS model A470L-A5R from Leeleds Lighting (Xiamen) Co., Ltd. and put out 470 lumens from 7.5 watts (62 lm/watt) marking it as a solid 40W incandescent equivalence. Leeleds is a member of Leedarson lighting, and describes itself as an "e2e Private Label Partner in Energy Saving Lighting". Their site shows a number of "smart lighting" solutions (ref here) that appear to use the same networking approach. Most interestingly is that it shows the product as "dimmable", which would strike me as quite a trick, not from the "dimmable via the remote control" side, but from the implied "compatible with dimming circuits". My personal vision of cutting up the AC waveform that is the input to a networking node is something that yields a result somewhere between "not good" and "disasterous". It will be interesting to hear how the skinned that particular cat, so to speak.

The tweets on their site mention that, "We may have a limited quantity for consumers, so complete the form if you haven't already. Thanks for your interest!" Given the 40W equivalence, added to the strength of the GreenWave team appearing to be very much oriented from the networking side, and what we really seem to be looking at is a mix of a) another instance of the computer age arriving to solve a problem the consumer doesn't have and b) a set of experimental tools for energy efficiency stakeholders to play with. It's especially interesting that this appears aimed to make a splash at consumers (although in limited quantities to consumers...) to sell the story. Reality is likely we've got cool networking technology that is one avenue of many to interconnect energy management and energy consuming "systems", but not a consumer answer at this point.

So how should we interact with our lighting?

Fundamentally, we want light where and when we need it, and our "needs" vary as our tasks vary. Common household examples of tasks include reading something on paper -- still a few books and snail mail around -- (with young eyes often differing from older eyes in the amount of light preferred), reading something on a PC or tablet, preparing meals, watching TV, and housework. There are more, certainly, but those few should help anyone visualize how they tend to desire differing types and amount of lighting at different times. Outside of a commercial space, the times in which different activities take place tend to vary a lot. While my home thermostat may work fine for the get up, leave, get home, go to bed kind of cycle, what we do inside those intervals is usually loosely scheduled, if scheduled at all. So fundamentally, we want our lighting to respond to what we're doing and how we're doing it, and not according to a schedule.

There are two options for how the lighting will know what we're doing: We can tell it; or it can figure it out. As long as it discerns correctly, and quickly, figuring it out is a fine option, but a bit of stretch for the amount of smarts it will require compared to the cost and benefit. In the commercial space, especially an office, where there are a limited set of tasks that are fairly well defined by the space, and where there are substantial incentives to use as little lighting energy as possible, it might work out. Perhaps very well, from the operator's standpoint, in the sense that it might make use "overrides" a rare occurrence, which allows the property operator to optimize their lighting and energy use more simply at that building level.

For our houses, it really strikes me that we're going to simply want to "tell" the lighting what we want to do, tuning that with what we want it to do, and then allow it some freedom to balance things out based upon some simple goals and some adaptation to what we'll let it get away with. A "full on" command might be met with "full enough" for us to read the fine print on the demand-response contract from the utility company, with some headroom for "emergency actually full on" when we see the contract is in an artistic font in the section titled "energy savings shall be deemed a higher priority than medical devices for those aged 75 or older who really don't have all that much time left..." I expect we'll want to both talk to it, as well as "gesture" to it, so that we're not having to holler out "on just a little" when we've arrived home from the airport after everyone else has gone to bed. A double circle of our hand to 'wake up' the gesture controller, then a slight upward lift of the hand to tell it to bring those lights up a bit should be all it takes.

We'd also expect that our lights, and household controls in general, can "learn" our patterns and get better at predicting what's need. Time between 5 and 7p on a weeknight, and someone walks into the kitchen, the lights come up a bit and standby to interpret the move that comes after the fridge stop. Did someone grab a soda, or are they carrying ingredients to the kitchen island?... Up come the task lights, with a color temp shift to help better see the veggies and meats that likely to get sliced.

So kudos to the folks that are pioneering "how" our interconnected devices will talk to each other, and thanks as well to the utilities that are working with consumers to perform those tests that will help us realize what should be a "correctly bright" future.