There are many types of lighting in the smart home and most people use smart bulbs or 'smart switches' but both have real limitations and can results in a poor user experience. It is for this reason that we have developed our own 'dynamic smart lighting'.
Dynamic smart lighting is lighting that can be used to convey useful information by supporting effects. For example, flashing three times to indicate the door bell has been pressed or a light that changes colour to tell you if the shower has reached a nice temperature.
Our dynamic smart lighting uses individually addressable LEDs or RGB/RGBW LED strips and bulbs but, it can also be a combination of these used with other LED lighting to achieve much higher light output. The main differentiator though is that our dynamic smart lighting uses our unified communications protocol and supports all the usual features such as dimming and colour changing, as well as supporting advanced lighting effects.
Dynamic smart lighting is not tied to any one particular networking technology and for best reliability, we prefer to use our wired IP network. This ensures the best performance and the lowest latency.
Another positive with our dynamic smart lighting is that operation, dimming and colour changing can be done using wall mounted switches for individual lights or groups of lights or by using any of the user interfaces in our contextual smart home (where permissions allow).
The great thing with our dynamic smart lighting is that it can take many forms. We are working on a number of different form factors, with it integrated into existing fixtures and also as a stand-alone lamp.
Our dynamic smart lighting incorporated into our smart shower.
Our dynamic smart lighting incorporated into our conservatory lamp.
Our dynamic smart lighting incorporated into a compact bedside light.
Dynamic smart lighting helps people see visual notifications where they may not otherwise hear or notice them. A good example of this is the dynamic smart light in our smart shower, where an extractor fan makes it hard to hear things outside of the bathroom.
Dynamic smart lighting is also very useful for anyone with a hearing impairment as it gives the contextual smart home a way to communicate important information visually.
Because our contextual smart home knows about all the lights in our smart home and also the types of each light, it can request a suitable effect on all dynamic smart lighting in certain circumstances.
In an emergency, our Home Control System will activate all of the emergency lighting in our home. This is essentially invisible red LEDs around out home that help us navigate in an emergency. In an emergency, our HCS will request all dynamic smart lighting to run the 'Emergency' effect and this causes it to turn on red and at 100% brightness.
You may ask why it just doesn't change the colour of all the dynamic smart lighting to red and requests an effect. The reason is simply that once the effect is over each dynamic smart light will automatically revert to its pre-effect state and our HCS thus doesn't need to worry about this.
The 'External Alarm' effect is requested each time the external alarm is activated and this does two things. It sets the colour to red but also starts a 'transient effect', which flashes the light 5 times. All the complexities of the effect are handled by the dynamic smart light and our HCS just needs to make one request to run the 'External Alarm' event. When the alarm is reset, a further request is made to cancel the effect.
The 'Internal Alarm' effect is requested each time the internal alarm is activated and it works exactly the same way as the 'External Alarm' event but, is orange in colour rather than red.
