Application of LED in remote controlled lighting

introduction

LEDs offer greater design flexibility for dimming and changing lighting colors, making them ideal for applications such as architectural lighting, indoor lighting and dimming, energy-efficient street lighting, and outdoor lighting where lighting can be controlled remotely.

These applications can bring users great value-added space, but in order to succeed in the market, the cost of upgrading lighting facilities to LED technology must be kept to a minimum. Undoubtedly, the solution that can reuse existing infrastructure is bound to be the most popular solution in the market.

In remote control LED lighting applications, the infrastructure with the highest product upgrade cost is the control LED lighting wiring. Fortunately, two technologies can be used to save this expensive upgrade cost: LED lights can be controlled through wireless links or through existing power lines using PLC technology.

PLC technology can support long-distance communication, but it may cause some problems when the circuit breaker or transformer of the AC line does not allow data to flow freely. Although wireless communication does not have this problem, the communication frequency is limited to the unlicensed band, and the wireless communication distance is also limited. In some cases, the two technologies can be combined to get the best solution: using power line communication without transformer barriers, and using wireless connections to support cross-transformer designs.

1 Main design requirements for remote control LED lighting

1.1 Communication Range

This depends on the specific application. For residential indoor applications, a communication range of about 30m can meet the requirements, while street lights require a communication range of several thousand meters.

1.2 Low power consumption

A key selling point of LEDs is their energy efficiency. When the lighting is turned off and only the communication lines remain active, it is critical to the design that the LED light consumes minimal power.

1.3 Communication speed rate

Some lighting applications only require a low communication rate (a few kbps) to meet the requirements of dimming control and fault status reading. However, architectural lighting sometimes requires very high data rates, even up to 100kbps. Wall washers are a typical example of such applications, where multiple lights are controlled through a bus and the light color needs to be changed continuously.