Lighting Optimizations

Modified on Tue, 26 Sep, 2023 at 8:37 AM

Lighting Optimizations¶

The lights in your location work according to the occupancy mode and settings configured in the policies effective in the location. However, you may want to make adjustments to those settings on a temporary basis or for specific lights based on user requests.

Task Tuning¶

One of the basic functions of the product is to provide the end user or occupant with lighting control over a given location. This requires providing them the ability to set individual fixture to a desired light level. Follow the steps below to adjust the light level for individual fixtures.

Task Tuning

Navigate to the Control Lights application and select the desired location.
Select the Fixtures tab to identify the fixture of interest
Adjust the light level (and/or color temperature if applicable) by moving the sliders. The fixture light level is immediately adjusted.

The custom fixture light level setting is persistent and takes effect when the current event or schedule (that is active) becomes active again. Therefore, you may adjust your fixture level to different light levels for different times of the day.

Location Overrides¶

There may be situations where you need to adjust the lighting behavior in a location.

If you have a wall controller, then you may use that to dim the lights up or down. However, if you do not have a wall controller, you can achieve the same behavior, by using the Control Lights application in smartmanager. The Brightness and Color Temperature sliders can be adjusted to change the settings for all the fixtures in the location.

These settings remain in effect as long as the space is occupied. Once the space is unoccupied, these settings are removed.

If your location has been configured with preset lighting settings or Scenes, then you may activate them from the smartmanager. A Scene remains in effect as long as the space is occupied.

Warning

You cannot task tune fixtures in a location when a Scene is in effect in the location.

If you wish to override policy parameters such as occupancy timeout, then you can initiate that from the smartmanager. When you save the changes, you will be prompted for the duration of time that these settings must be in effect. After that time duration, the location is restored back to the original policy setting.

Color Tuning¶

The smartmanager can be used to adjust the color temperature of LED lights with color tuning capability. The color temperature is expressed as a percentage signifying the ratio of warm color to cold color (0% warm is completely cold temperature setting, and 100% warm is completely warm setting). The actual color temperatures produced are dependent on the lights being used.

The color temperature can be configured as a part of the policy, and those settings can be customized per fixture using Task Tuning or as part of Scene definitions. The color temperature to be used with a policy can be specified in two ways -

A Static or fixed value that will be used as warm percentage during the entire duration that the policy is in effect.
A Automatic Time Of Day based value that will be used as warm percentage while the policy is in effect. In this case, the value of the warm percentage depends on the time of the day, and increments by one percent at regular intervals during the course of the day. The table below shows the value of the color temperature at various times of the day.

From	To	Starting Warm Percent Value	Final Warm Percent Value
6:00AM	900AM	100	50
9:00AM	11:00AM	50	15
11:00AM	12:00PM	15	0
12:00PM	1:00PM	0	0
1:00PM	2:00PM	0	15
2:00PM	4:00PM	15	50
4:00PM	7:00PM	50	100

Night Lights¶

There may be lighting fixtures that you want to operate at certain light level or higher. For example, you want to ensure that certain lights can never operate below 20% light level to ensure security cameras get adequate lighting or any other reason. Therefore, the fixtures should not be allowed to go lower than this threshold under any circumstances irrespective of policy setting or wall controller events. This feature can be enabled by designating fixtures as night lights and setting the night light level.

Configuring Night Lights

Navigate to the Commission System application, and select the Fixtures section.
From the location tree under the Fixtures section select the location where the fixtures are located
Use the Configure Night Lights action in the action bar to set up the night light fixtures and light level.

Motion Sharing¶

This feature allows you to set up locations such that the occupancy state of the location is determined not just by the fixtures in the location, but also sensors from other locations. You may set up locations to share all fixture motion events or only motion events from specific fixtures. For example, motion seen in hallway near restrooms can be used to turn on lights in the restroom. You may designate sensors in the hallways closest to the restrooms to share their motion events with the restroom locations, so that when an individual walks into the restroom, the light fixtures are already ON and not dependent on the motion seen by the sensors within to reach that state.

You may combine motion sharing with policy light level shutoff parameters to ensure that when an office is occupied, the adjacent spaces remain at minimum light level if those offices are occupied. When they are not occupied, the lights can be turned off completely.

Motion sharing is a powerful tool that should be used with careful planning so that you know when lights need to be turned on or off.

Note

The location accepting the shared motion event always follow their configured policy settings. The determination of occupancy state is affected by remote locations/sensors sharing their motion. The remote location is not affected, and its policy and occupancy settings do not affect this location.

Partitioned Spaces¶

Large open spaces or multipurpose/conference rooms may sometimes be dynamically reconfigured into smaller spaces using partitions that can be opened or closed through third party sensors/controllers. Depending on the state of the partition (opened or closed as reported by partition sensor), the behavior of the lighting fixtures as well as the sensors determining the occupancy state may need to be different. This feature can be implemented on your smartengine by integrating with the partition sensor through APIs as follows:

Create a virtual fixture entity representing the partition sensor. This external partition sensor can update the state of this fixture to be opened or closed based on the state of the sensor. Refer to Virtual Fixtures APIs for more details.
Assign the fixture corresponding to the partition sensor to the main location
Create locations under the main location that represent each smaller space that is formed by closing the partitions and create partition sensor configurations to define the fixtures that need to be moved or assigned based on the state of the partition sensor.
You can set up the smaller locations with events and policies.

Creating Virtual Fixtures

Navigate to Commission System application and select Fixtures section
In the Overview tab, click on ... button next to the Third Party - Virtual Lights/Sensor item under Fixture Types. Select the Configure Virtual Fixtures action.
Select the virtual fixtures tab and add new virtual fixtures.
Select the capabilities of virtual fixture based on the actual fixture it represents.
Once virtual fixture is added, a corresponding fixture entity is created in the system which can then be configured like any other fixture.

Configuring Partition Sensor Settings

Navigate to Commission System application and select Locations section
In the location tree in the side navigation, select the location with the partition sensor
Select Add Partition Settings to set up the locations to be activated, and fixtures to be assigned to those locations when sensor is closed.