Customer Background
The customer is a leading US-based manufacturer of smart lighting and home automation solutions. They work with customers big and small — from single-family homes to large commercial and industrial buildings — offering more than 25,000 products for every conceivable need.
Customer Need
Our customer envisioned a comprehensive multi-protocol gateway platform that could communicate with an array of wired and wireless systems in their distributed lighting control products. Softdel’s extensive experience with multiple communication protocols and gateway development influenced the customer to partner with us and develop a firmware and software system for their platform, which could enable easy Over-The-Air (OTA) firmware upgrades, be commissioned via a mobile application, and integrate with building management systems (BMS).
Softdel’s Solution
- Softdel engineered a comprehensive firmware and software platform to address all needs of modern lighting control applications.
- To establish complete interoperability with almost any lighting device, Softdel integrated common communication protocol stacks, including proprietary CAN and Softdel's BACnet stack.
- The platform was further enabled with cloud connectivity for easy BMS integration.
- The firmware was designed to work with both wired and wireless systems that facilitated seamless plug-and-play architecture.
- The OTA firmware upgrade module included:
- Wi-Fi OTA update
- ZigBee Coordinator update through the boot loader
- ZigBee Node (Router/End Device) update through ZigBee OTA
- Auto-device discovery, and duplicate address detection, in addition to scheduling, device locate, and power monitoring
Standards and Technology
Communication Protocols: Bluetooth, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, DALI
Programming Language: C/C++ | H/W
Platform: Mighty Gecko, Silicon Labs efr32
Tool: Bitbucket, JIRA, Confluence
Benefits
- Unparalleled programming flexibility: The platform can extend its lighting control capabilities for virtually any application across the globe, making it fully scalable and flexible.
- Exceptional customer success: The customer's platform is presently operative in a major airport in the western US hemisphere and will be adopted across multiple commercial structures in the near future, while already finding various uses in residences and industries.
- Configurable, secure, and revolutionary: The platform's ability to add, edit, and modify controls in a fully encrypted environment makes its usage very convenient and safe for every stakeholder, from our customer to the end user.
