Our front garden lights are a good example of how we can use any 'dumb' lighting connected to our contextual smart home, to make it really smart. We didn't like being restricted to using existing smart lighting products on the market, so we choose high quality, stainless-steel lamps which we integrated into composite fence posts. These are 12V dc wired lamps. The lamps and wiring have been hidden within the posts.
We choose these lights because they are extremely compact, stylish and provide a nice warm-white light. We were also very careful to choose lights that provided the right level of light output and were not dazzlingly bright but, provide enough light to act as a nice lighting feature and also to see your way to our front door.
These lights are a good example of our smart home building blocks approach to smart home. The lights are connected to one of our low voltage output modules, which is in turn connected to a slave processor. This means our smart home can use technology abstraction to control the lights and we can also control them via any of the user interfaces available.
It is really simple to configure them to come on with an adaptive schedule, i.e one that adapts to twilight and sunset times. We can also easily configure them to come on when the porch or drive is occupied, since our occupancy is something our smart home models and is available to our software controllers.
The lights are an attractive garden feature in their own right at dusk.
In our road, the street lighting is switched off at midnight, meaning it can get very dark. The lights provide plenty of light to see your way to our front door, without being too bright.
