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Episode 130: Episode 130 - WaveLinx - One Phone Call To Make with Martin Mercier
00:55:55
🚀 Is DALI Finally Ready for Prime Time?Is DALI-2 finally solving the problems that held digital l...
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- [00:00]
A
The opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the sponsors, advertisers, or presenters. Advertising does not imply endorsement by the sponsors and presenters.
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B
Hey, guys, and welcome back to the Lighting Controls podcast. We have another fantastic guest for you today. But before we jump into the conversation, let me remind everyone, today's episode is presented by the lca, the Lighting Controls Academy.
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C
And it's an official podcast of nailed, the national association of Innovative Lighting Distributors. And check out our website, lightingcontrolspodcast.com got all of our episodes and a whole lot more. But huge shout out to our sponsor for this episode, Cooper Lighting Solutions and their new Wavelengths Dall E platform. If you're not familiar with this new feature that's additional to the wavelengths ecosystem, I highly recommend you check it out because it really does expand what wavelengths can do, giving you that Dall E2 interoperability in your lighting control solutions. So you can kind of expand out into the Dall ecosystem as well, while still having your wavelengths products alongside everything that you've known throughout the wavelengths, you know, ecosystem that you use. And so I definitely recommend you check them out. Cooper lighting.com and check out. Do a search for wavelengths, Dolly. But let's get into the conversation. So today we have Martin from Cooper. Martin, do you mind just giving us a quick breakdown on who you are and what you do?
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A
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Webster. Thanks, everybody. Yeah, Martin Mercier. I was brought in to connect the lights a few years ago. We will get into that later probably. But I'm the strategic marketing manager for. For Connected Systems and Connected Buildings here at Cooper Lighting Solutions, responsible for commercialization and. Yeah, I'm happy to be here to talk about a few things here, including Dali.
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C
Yeah, no, thanks for coming on. And it's timely because we just had somebody on in our previous episode talking about Dall? E and some of the friction points regarding implementation. And so from your perspective, what is going on with Dali and where do people kind of sit when it comes to Dali?
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A
Yeah, I thought Dali was the European protocol lighting control. Why are we talking about that now, today, here? Yeah, no, I mean, Dali came from far right. Delhi was obviously created in Europe, basically, you know, and we, the North American manufacturers, jumped on it, but we had challenges. Right. But it was basically created born in Europe. And, and it was backed out by IEC standards, which is gospel there, not here. And. And you know, it was pushed by the building energy standards there. And as you might know, you know, Europe is about five to ten years ahead of us. When it comes to building in energy standards. Right. So they were forced into a better lighting control solution to be compared with the IEC requirements. But that Dall E1 legacy protocol, because that what it was when it started, right? It was basically a protocol, a digital way of programming lights. Right. And creating groups and. But then that solution ended up being a closed system and interoperability was a nightmare. And we can all pretty much know about it. If we don't we have somebody that knows about it, we're not too far. Right? So it was a nightmare. And that model didn't work. Right. Didn't take real long. As soon as we got to the maintenance part of these products, these Dali legacy products, that would not work for very long because you could not really maintain well or in an easy way, I guess, at the very least not even talking about the commissioning.
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B
Right.
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A
Which was pretty heavy. So we came from Delhi. Now is a whole different story.
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C
Right, right. Well, and I think, you know, it's interesting how Europe just sort of like embraced it as well, because it really has kind of become sort of the standard there, whereas over here, really haven't adopted it over here. And I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, what do you think the friction points are?
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A
Yeah, I mean, there's different things, right. So we got lucky enough that at the time that the energy building standards started to be more prominent, right. Starting from California for most of it and down to the whole nation that other technologies were available, right. A little bit like the Sony mini disc that came out and then 50 players came out at the same time and Europe and had all those little shiny, nicely looking discs. But here we happened to gotten to it when the MP3 players were coming out with the iplayer and other things, right. Other manufacturers did the same thing, so we didn't really need that technology. So kind of the same thing that happened here with zigbee coming out, right. And being, I'll say, powerful enough to be used for ambient lighting controls, even outdoor lighting control.
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B
Right.
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A
When we talk about thousand of nodes and quite a distance between poles, right. For a parking lot, you can look at 200 foot distance between two poles. Sometime on a street you might have a line of products, you know, a line of fixtures and have to pop up between 1 to 10 fixtures. So pretty powerful, I guess, powerful enough that it gave us an easier button. Right. To deploy network lighting control. So that kind of. That's kind of part of it. But. But overall, yes, the problems. There were many challenges with the legacy Daly system. We talked about it interoperability, that's definitely one. The commissioning is probably the next one. That was the biggest problem. And techie guys like us kind of enjoyed it. Right. To go and program and see the light fashions, but it took way too long. It costs a lot of money, too, to send technicians out there and. And not even to mention those that had to do it, didn't care about it, and they end up doing it anyways. And it got burned to the process. And then, as I mentioned earlier, the maintenance of it.
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B
Right.
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A
So what happened? Once the wall station starts failing, the contractor or the maintenance person or facility manager will probably call the next distributor he knows about and ask for this model that looks like this and then get it on site and then install it, and nothing's working. And if it's working well, it's not as it used to be. So that was probably three most important major issues that we ran into with the legacy Dali.
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C
Sure. Well, so, I mean, we've had the Dali alliance on the show before talking about Dali too. And, you know, the innovations they've layered on top of the legacy Dali to beef it up and address some of those concerns. From your perspective as a manufacturer, since you're pretty much offering it with your products, it sounds like you believe that it has solved those issues.
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A
Correct. So looking at Dali 2.
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C
Right.
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A
Looking at the new generation of Dali, there's many reasons why using Dali. Right. So we are in a world right now where digitalization of our assets is prominent. Right. And there's many examples out there outside of the lighting industry that you can tell how much we're getting digitalized at the end of the day one or not. I get quiz results from my kids at the second they're done with their quiz. You know, I didn't even get a paper telling me that they failed. Doesn't happen often, but. Or they got an A plus. But I'm still getting that email when I'm at work and, you know, looking at my watch. Oh, you got whatever A plus on that quiz that I don't care about. But yeah, I get it.
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C
Right.
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So it's happening across the board and we're part of it. And the lighting is the backbone of a lot of building communication. Not everything. Don't get me to the BMS and other type of communication we have in buildings. We're a smaller part of the world, but the world of the buildings, obviously. But we are part of it. We're in buildings and we contribute by a big factor to the energy savings. So that's number one, I mentioned energy code. So that's the second reason why coding is to get. Get more efficient and green building incentives and so on. We are part of it. We need to help there with lowering the energy usage. We're just following that too far from the building. H vacs.
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C
Right.
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Equipment and so on. The third one is we're getting fancier with lighting too. Right. We have solutions that goes beyond lighting control and they can enable beyond lighting controls, functionalities and features and benefits.
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C
Right? Right.
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A
So we all heard about Tunable White lately. It's happening, right? And those are the benefits of Tunable White. We're hard to pin down. Right. As a hard number. But now the science is catching up. And it's been probably 10, 20 years, not more than that, that we realized that the color of the light had a big impact on us. And that mostly because of the LEDs, right. We had to go deeper, understand what's the impact of the blue, the navy blue that we have.
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B
And.
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A
And with that technology, such technology. And then we realized, well, it's more complex than what we perceive. It's a spectrum that has different colors and we happen to need some of the cyan blue because, hey, it's the color of the sky and it tells us that it's the day or it's the night. So. And mostly for healthcare, right? The practitioner there understand really well that science. So how do you enable these things? Right. You might want to do a Tunable wide project with dual 10 vaults. But good luck for the cycling. Right? And good luck for the. The maintenance of the system. You'll see that DALI is not too bad at that point, but. But the Dall E2 enables these beyond lighting proposals, right? Or Value Prop, if you will. And I mentioned building. So we're close to other verticals within the building where we can help and how. Well, you know, as we all know, sensing is important. So being able to tell if there's people in the room not is one thing. We happen to need sensors to create schedules and provide better dimming, if you will, or more aggressive dimming. But as long as there's nobody in the room, right? But that sensing the value of that, the data that the lighting is catching up by knowing if there's somebody in the room or not is way beyond your savings.
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C
Right.
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If you can share that with other systems or other verticals. So Dall E enables that. Right? And it can go up to real time locating systems right. Where we had tags. And then we are everywhere in a building, you know, we have lights everywhere. So if you happen to have connected lights right through ZigBee or other technologies, then you need to add some tags to it and you can enable a lot of tracking.
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B
Right.
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A
So those things need to be digital systems based. And DALI is still the best, one of the best solution when it comes to wired. And I mentioned hospitals. Hospitals prefer wired lighting controls for many reasons. So your DALI system is still the best foundation you can get for that.
- [11:24]
B
So you mentioned sort of digitization, right? And like you said, we see it everywhere in all of our everyday lives. Now, like you mentioned with your kids, quizzes and stuff, everyone else is moving that way. All the other systems have moved that way. What do you see as sort of the biggest pain point? Why is lighting still stuck in an analog age? Why are, you know, all the lights are digital, the communication between the driver and the physical LED is digital. Why are we still stuck in this age where we're running, running analog wire to these fixtures when we have digital protocols like Dall E and other things out there that are capable of providing us that platform to have all these enhancements that you're talking about, the additional, you know, information that we can gather from sensors, sharing between, you know, other groups and other organizations and being able to share that data with H Vac or, you know, whoever else needs it. So how do we, how do we start to push forward and get out of this analog age that we seem to be so stuck in?
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A
Yeah, I wish I had the answer to answer the question, but there's many answers, right. And I have a piece of the puzzle, I guess, on my end, that I would say that it's probably the number one thing that comes to mind. It's education, right?
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C
It's.
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A
Those are complex things. You know, it's not easy. Nobody will say it's easy, but it's getting easier, if I can put it that way, when it comes to the Dali 2 and whatever came after the legacy Dali 1 systems. And we'll touch base on that, but education is number one. Understanding what it is is super important for all the stakeholders in the valve chain. And we have to remind, I think we'll talk Delhi here, there's other wired lighting control protocols and system that exists out there. But when it comes to ambient lighting and Iot based value props, which I'm going to touch on as well later, DALI is the right solution. It's still the best solution we have from a lighting industry standpoint, including North America. But we need to educate stakeholders on it. We need to keep on telling the story, as I like to say, and those that are listening, you have to get in and try.
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B
Right.
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A
If you didn't try it, and you have to contribute to the whole ecosystem, to our lighting industry, by giving a shot at it and learning from doing it. That's the best way to learn. We're forced into it with building energy standards. Some states and some different locations that we have. Sometimes cities too are on different legislations. So that's a good proof for me that it's working well in those areas. So it's not easy at the beginning, but you do end up working with the. The same specifiers, the same contractors, sometimes facility managers. And it does get easier as soon as you started it and worked on it. And then the second, third and fifth one are easier to deploy and actually are fun to do inside some level. But we have to remind everybody on why. Dali, I guess.
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C
Right?
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So DALI is the proper, as I mentioned, the best. It was created for the lighting industry, by the lighting industry. And it's not an RS485 communication protocol, as a lot of us would like to think. The whole printers and industrial communication we used to use because for many reasons, it's polarity free. You can flip the wires and it will still be working, which is important to polish.
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C
That's why I always say Dall E is easier to install than 0 to 10, right?
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Correct. It's harder to test. If you want to get some type of signal that, hey, it's working on that. It's digital. Right. So 0, 10 volt contractor would like it because they can put a meter on it and see. All right, I get seven, I get 10, whatever. It seems to be working kind of. So that's the complexity of the digital system.
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C
Right.
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A
You have to find another way to test your wiring. But on that end, it's also topology free. You don't have to use daisy chain. You can use a star and. And that makes it also robust against the noise, you know. So I did some project in stroll space with 4, 8, 5 and you would start a machine later on and boom, everything is gone. Nothing is working computing anymore. That's not the case with Dali. And most of the time you don't need fancy shield cables. That was a big part with 45, you know, and I go back to 45 because that was the system prior Dali, probably that was the closest to a Dali system system, you know, with the early mud bus communication computers. But I'm not that old, by the way. I just happened to live through it and have to do one project.
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C
A nerd like us.
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A
Yeah, so it was made by the lighting industry for the lighting industry and all of these things. Polarity free, topology free. You don't need a fancy shield cable to deploy. In many cases, you put, you can put it put your cables inside the same conduit for the line voltage. Right. So those are the reasons why we have to remind ourselves sometime why we're using Dali. But then the turning point, right, is Dali 2.0. Right. This is where I really think that we went from a closed ecosystem to opening to many vendors, manufacturers. So open system. So we're not the Apple of the world anymore. We open and that's. This is really complex. You know, it's like, oh yeah, it's easy. Everybody's using usb, right? But remember, right, Apple had their own charger for a little while, right?
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C
Yeah.
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You know, they had their own and they fought it as much as they could. They were claiming that an open standard will slow down innovation. And we're talking about this thing here, you know, Right.
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C
For those who are listening and not watching, he's holding up a USB cable. But yeah, I mean, I think that's a really, really good point. And that's one of the things that comes up a lot on the podcast is this proprietary nature that we're in in the US and the fact that if you buy one company's product, you're stuck with that one company's product for everything else. And that's one of the promises of Dolly is this open capability of being able to mix things in. And so I think that's why people like me and Ron want to see Dolly take off, because we want to have that ability to go, well, I like this keypad, but I like that sensor and I like this dimmer. And you can make that choice if they all communicate on Dolly.
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A
And also as I mentioned earlier, what happened after a year or so, two years, 10 years within the building, Unfortunately, a lot of customers had to change completely A to Z. They're lying control because the manufacturer disappeared or change their system or discontinue the actual system. Right. So we. That's the pain of innovation, Right. Sometimes you have to let go of the legacy because it doesn't get upgraded an easy way and you have to pivot to another platform. But with Dall E2, you know, we're looking at solving that problem with certified products. So not everybody is Apple. You know, Apple has that. I mean, they're, they're awesome. By what you have done from an innovation standpoint. But they control the whole value chain. Right. Hardware, software, communication, and even down to services. Right, right. With the. All the stores and everything. But not everybody can do that. It's, it's. And we learned it hardware in the lighting industry. Right. So now we're getting to the open network and also, you know, we're talking about communication and lighting control. But we touch a little bit on beyond lighting. But the beyond lighting is as important. It's not prominent as lighting controls, but it's a place we can go us, the light industry, because we're everywhere. We have lights everywhere, every corner of every street, every building, every floor.
- [19:30]
C
We have to have devices everywhere as well. And so we have the visibility to, you know, kind of see what's going on within projects. And so having that data collection, that Iot, for those who are unfamiliar with the term Internet of things, it's. You're just enabling a device to connect to the Internet and share data. But, you know, having that ability layered on top of the lighting controls really gives it that robustness nature. And so, you know, from your perspective, have you seen, you know, IoT applications with Dall E?
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A
Definitely, yeah. And I have an interesting story about IoT. And for those who wonder, okay, what's the difference? We're talking about connected systems and we're talking Zigbee, Bluetooth, you know, mesh and then wired, obviously two wire or bus control or can bus. And then we get to Iot. So what is it? Right. And within our own industry, we've been talking IOT since Slide Fair 2015, probably. Right. But by the way, if you happen to attend, you know, attend trade shows in North America that are not lighting focused, nobody knows about that. You know, I attended many healthcare trade shows, Ashy PDC Summit hymns. We were at Wilcom last. Last month, last week, two weeks ago with the Dali Alliance. So I'm now a member of the North American Dali alliance team. And thank you. Yeah, back to Delhi a little bit and. But yeah, we. It's starting getting known, but not enough. So I was talking education earlier between us, the lighting industry, but beyond the lag industry needs to be done. It's not clearly understood the position we have in the building and how much we can contribute to the building. Right. So it's important. But back to your question. What is the number one thing, number one principle from an IoT device? Have you ever wondered what it was? And I know what it is because I've learned through the hard way what it was. But it is identification the number one thing IoT device does is telling what the device is when it comes to lighting is I'm a fixture, I'm a sensor, I'm a controller with an address. Right. I'm number seven, I'm number 13. That's the base of. That's the foundation of IoT. And it started back in the 90s where they developed RFID technology, which happened to work in after school. I worked for a startup for two years and we were doing IoT just
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C
to stop you for a second, in case people aren't familiar with rfid. Do you mind just giving a quick definition of that?
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A
Yeah, radio frequency identification. You know, I didn't realize that. I remember that, but yeah, it's the base of it, right. So we used to do chips and that's how I got to 45 projects with an industrial space. We were tracking hooks and packages and animals, you know, and creating a connected ecosystem to track the meat. Basically. We did the same thing for casino gaming industry. But the most important was this chip is $100 chip. This is that cow, this is that package, right? So a short story about why Iot and lighting. A while ago I was working as electronic engineer in Double E and I was hired to connect the lights. That's how they got me in. So my first reflex was, all right, I'm going to be using RFID for poles and fixtures and. And then zigbee came in and one of the first early projects, I guess that I had to contribute to as a lighting manufacturer was to integrate radios and sensors, but mostly radios into fixtures. And it was with the city of San Jose and it wasn't the first one, but it was one of the first ones. And he asked me to provide dimming curve. I'm like, hey, fairly easy job. So I asked the lab to do the dimming curves. But at that time, back at, in those days, 2009, probably 2008, I'm not too sure, but we were using a bunch of manufacturers for drivers, right? We had all flavors of wattage and lumen output and I had a matrix with about, you know, 50 flavors of one post up power and lumen outputs. And it was a shit show really. 30%. And that was only us at that time. It was Lumac, you know, and I was like, oh. And I don't know what to tell. So I called the salesperson, you know, I said, hey, I don't know what to answer because it won't look, it won't look cute, it will be ugly because it's A swing. And he said, well, tell the truth, right? And he was smart because he knew he had more business to do with that city than that pilot of 20 lights, right? So I called him and said, hey, I'm going to tell you about this, but you won't like it. It's. It's a, it's a more than 30% swing sometime. And as we know, dimming down more than 30% has an impact per IAS guidelines, right? RP8 and so on. So I was in trouble. But then I realized after, hey, I'm not the only one in trouble. All manufacturers are using the same drivers, right? But I happened to be part of Philips Lighting at that time. And then I knew that some of my folks down in Eindhoven were working daily drivers and I end up testing the lab and I realized, oh, those are really dimming in a way that you can trust, right? And it will be precise. So I called back the salesperson, the city of San Jose and said, hey, I have a solution. We could use DALI drivers and you would have to get it certified on site by you will because those are all only ce. But hey, it's working. We're LED platform and we precise domain. So not too long after I had the same conversation with somebody from Georgia Power, Kevin, not to mention. Hi Kevin, if you're listening about Dall E and we were talking about photocell dimming and I realized, well, we're Talking about like 10,000 nodes photocells working with a bunch of fixtures. Do you think this is going to be dimming the right way all the time? No, not at all. You stand no chance. It's going to be all across the board from 50%, 100%, maybe above 100% per your standards. So you have to figure out a solution. And I have one daily. But it happened to work with the European lighting control manufacturer at the time time. So DALI controls, when you ask them about it, said well yeah, we do have Dalley controls. And I said hey, I have Dalley drivers. So we started that way and, and the first thing I was asked to do in that project for Georgia Power was to create a spreadsheet with all of our fixture we're going to be providing. And then I was like, okay, I need to create like this line by line. This is a pink looking fixture with 97 controller and a twist lock and good luck finding which one it is. So then I kind of asked my, my teammates and at advance, right, is there any way we can program the drivers? Because we're using Dall E. So we might be able to get that Mac address of the driver. And then they said, well, we can do better in that, Martin. We can give you a space. You know, we have E prompt on there. We'll give you a space. Just put your data in there and you make. You can name your whatever, robot fixture A and it would be like 010101 whatever 8 by and do the same thing. And then I said, well, we can do that. I can share that information with the customer and they can gather information from other manufacturers using daily drivers as well. So I didn't realize that at that point, but we're starting an IoT project. Basically we're giving the address, the name, we're giving basically a name to our fixtures. So that started all that project called Sensor Ready at Philips and. And Sensor Ready was about programmable drivers that you can name and provide information. And then it grew to metering information and grew to power.
- [27:14]
B
Right?
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A
You can power your device through an internal power bus. But the biggest question was, okay, how do we do that at a larger scale? So the team in Rosemont started, and she was doing that, started gathering devices for many vendors and certifying devices like URSR Ready or SR certified in that case as a photocell, as a sensor. And that way we could control the ecosystem, the open ecosystem. But that wasn't enough, right? Because a private entity doing it, you want to have a virtual entity doing that. So we end up working with Dal E Alliance at that time to create the defoi. So the default I that comes after Dali too, which is outdoor and indoor, is your answer as a lighting industry to the IoT. It's providing a name of the device. It is a certified way of having an ecosystem of devices, right? And it's open and then it allows to have different roles on a fixture. So I'm pointing like I have a Cobra, but it could be a truck, a strip, many type of flavors, but it doesn't matter, right? It's a point of connection. And that point of connection can have a control, a sensor, which is most of the time combined when it comes to indoor and data. So I mentioned naming is important. The second thing is important. Second principle for IoT is the data. How do you gather data? How do you treat that data? Are you making an action on site at the fixture level, the data by going up and down with a fixture, are you backing up that data somewhere in the cloud and use it later for reports? This is as important. Otherwise it's not Relevant, right? The communication, are you Communicating through Internet 5G as an example for outdoor mesh, networking, wired control. And what is the last one? You might think about it or you might know based on what I've said, but there's a fourth one. So do you have any idea? The fourth one is. Go ahead.
- [29:28]
C
No, I'm drawing a blank. What about you, Ron?
- [29:31]
B
No, I have no idea.
- [29:32]
C
Go for it.
- [29:33]
A
Yeah, no, it's the sensing, right? Oh well, yeah, you would say that. It's obvious, right. But you have the naming, the communication, the sensing to create that data, right. And then the, the data itself. So all of this for the light industry needed to be defined. So how you do that?
- [29:53]
C
Right.
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A
We kind of did it while working networking and connected systems. But the default I became the foundation because it can do all of that. And at one point, when it comes to IoT your device's concussion, your internal device bus doesn't have to be standard. You know, it has, it could, it has to be manufactured and perhaps industry standard. But it doesn't have to be a Zigbee, a 5G, you know, only outside the devices has to be standard. So we, the lighting industry, I'm not sure who was part of that conversation, but at least some of us decided that Dali was the right foundation for the D4I versus USB versus whatever else we had, you know, 45. And so Dali was the right foundation because hey, we happen to have a ton of drivers that talk Dali already. But also it was robust enough to be inside fixtures and to do that internal bus communication. So if you compare to other industries like take Samsung washing machines, they have their own communication protocol inside their machines. But you don't care about that, right? As long as you can hit, you know, dry and whatever, you know, whatever cycle you picked. And then on your app you can tell your driver is again blocked or did not dry or clean or you have to clean that filter, whatever. You don't care about the inside of the machine. So that's our inside protocol D4I. And it's certified in a way that you can add devices that have a role, so controller, sensor, driver. And then most importantly, it's open to other devices that are not lighting specific. And this is where the value is. Energy saving is just a starting point. Beyond lighting is where the money is, right? And we have to get there. And defoeye is our way the lighting industry to provide that open ecosystem for beyond lighting value props that goes through real time locating system RTLS, right. Wayfinding and all these things are blue sky IDs are happening. Not at the scale I wish it was, but it is happening, and we need to have a solid base for that. And Defy is coming for that. Right. And it's from us, by us, for the. For the Beyond Lighting industry proposals.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah. And beyond lighting is, obviously, it's super important, but I think a lot of people struggle with just even the basics of the digital lighting. And so I just want to. I want to back up a little bit because there's a couple of things that are so important that I think a lot of people don't pay attention to and gloss over the idea that you can name your devices and get information back from them. People, I don't think, understand how important that is. When you. It doesn't matter if you're looking at a ceiling of 30 fixtures or 300 fixtures, you can identify that individual light. When you're on a digital protocol like Dall E, you can't do that. With an analog protocol. If you have 10, 0 to 10 fixtures linked together, there's zero information. They all turn on and off together. The other thing that you mentioned was dimming curves, right? And how important that dimming is. When you have a digital driver like Dolly and you tell those fixtures to go to 20%, every one of those fixtures is going to be at 20%. No ifs, ands or buts about it, no questions. When you're on an analog system, if you've got 10 fixtures in that 0 to 10 loop, right. Or in that 0 to 10 line, there is a extremely high likelihood that that last fixture and all, a bunch of the others, are going to be at a very different intensity level than the first fixture, simply based on cable length, voltage, drop, all these really simple things. And this is part of why. I don't understand why getting digital protocols like Dall E into these newer buildings is so difficult. When you. We can look at all the advantages of moving forward and moving into the IoT space and beyond lighting, but the fact that we're having such a hard problem getting people to understand the benefits, the simple benefits of a digital driver is one of, I think, the key pitfalls of why we're not getting this pushed forward. So we try to sell all these amazing features and ideas, but how do we really kind of simplify it and bring it back and make people understand the advantages of moving to a digital system? It's just at the simplest level, so that we can get the adoption from the contractors, because you could sell the owner all day. But if we don't have buy in from all these contractors who are physically doing the installation. They're going to stick with what they know, which is what we see time and time again.
- [34:35]
A
This is definitely true. Right. And the blue sky ideas that we just went through. And coming back down to her day to day work, we're talking about lighting control and. And I have nothing against Joe Tenbolt. Right. It's useful in some cases in the right protocol. But to your point, when it comes to project, and as an example, that includes different levels, different grouping, different zones. You can't really do that with 010 volts, right. For many reasons. As you mentioned, take just a K12 class now with monitors and different type of activities happening in the class. It's more dynamic than it used to be. You might want to have a zone where the teacher is teaching and might have different scenes that will be used depending on the activity happening. Are we watching a screen? Are we looking at the board? Are we looking at the demo, whatever on a table, Are we reading? Are we focusing? Are we playing? So all of these things happening with different scenes in the class are hard to do with Zoo tempo, right? And plus the building now are dynamics, right. They are changing, they are adapting. And I think going forward. You know, that's the word that always comes to my mind when I think about AI. It's adapting to the new situation. You know, we had Covid, we had supply chain issues we had over the last five, six, seven years.
- [36:01]
C
Right.
- [36:01]
A
But it's the same thing going forward. It won't change. We'll have to adapt to something. And I didn't mention tariff, but that's another one too that we had to adapt. So Dali gives you at some level that adaptation. You might want to think wireless in some cases because it's easier to adapt your space. You don't have the wiring, you have battery equipped sensors, battery equipped wall stations. So the wireless helps you further. But still from the flexibility center point on the wired lighting control, the Dali gives you that, and you mentioned it earlier, you can have an address, you can program, you can. You can regroup these things once. If the class change, if it's not a class anymore, it happens to be an office, you can easily readapt your space. So for those lighting control, basic lighting control proposals, and I took the class as an example. But you can expand to the gymnasium, you can expand to other spaces in the school and hospital retail office space. For that reason you want to have Dali because it's going to be easier, simpler and cost Effective at the end.
- [37:08]
C
Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'm curious, from the Cooper perspective, why is this an embrace that you're leaning into? Because as you brought up with Apple, it's so easy to just stay in your closed loop system and say, okay, well, wavelengths products, wavelengths project. That's it, that's. That's what you get. And, and you got to stick with it. But you know, a lot of manufacturers that I've spoken to about embracing open standards of any kind, let alone, you know, a protocol, you know, they push back and say, well, you know, we don't want to be the first ones because then we're just going to get, you know, eaten alive. And so, you know, what is like, there's a perspective there that, that seems to have shifted at least a little bit.
- [37:58]
A
Yeah, we, if I talk wavelength specifically, our goal, you know, at Cooper was
- [38:06]
B
to
- [38:08]
A
have one system. Really. We talked about interoperability and maintenance and future ready. I don't like future proof, but as much as we can try to integrate into a development and system launches and life cycle, a future ready solution. Right. So number one thing was to have one system, one system that does it all. If we can't be interpretable. Interpret interpretable between us, between our own devices, how can we have the industry to be right?
- [38:42]
C
Right.
- [38:43]
A
But as soon as you say that Right. Daddy comes somewhere into place solving some of your issues. Right, Right. So it had to come to Wavelengths at one day or another. We knew it was coming. We had a legacy DALI system, but we knew that we had to build from scratch because Wavelengths is a native hybrid platform. When I say native is. Yes. Cooper grew in their system portfolio by acquiring different solutions in house building or in house creation of solutions and partnerships and M&As. But at the end of the day, we knew that the future was a different place, which is one system for all. So we started from the baseline of using Wavelengths, which is a system that was built at Cooper and it's a home system. You know, we're not. It's. Everything was built in mostly and then grew inside Cooper 2 and evolved as a Cooper native system. So then we added to it. So, so Wavelengths was a zigbee system. It's still a zigbee system. That's our pro technology. We added Bluetooth, which is our light technology. Recently, two years ago, we had Cat, which is a bus communication system, wired system with CAT cables. We added panels. So we still need panels to control different areas. You know, I talked about the score. Cool example well, your parking lot might be panelists within what you need more than what you would need in terms of controls or your gymnasium. Right. So we added the panel offering pre built panels that we connect to the same app to the same ecosystem. So the next piece was Deli. So we just added the DALI technology a few months ago. And to answer your question, interoperability is definitely one. But we wanted to stress the flexibility beyond you know, what wavelength was already wired and wireless system. By adding open an open ecosystem. So that's interesting because you're adding an open ecosystem, we can do a full blown campus daily. You know, as one system it will be wavelengths daily technology across the board. But if you wish to, you can have wireless. It's the same, it's the same system. You know, you can use the same system and have some dally wired devices out there which long term could be maintained and supported as Dali2 devices. So they're certified devices. You can go on the DALYA alliance website and scroll down all the DALI certified device. And then longer term it's easier to maintain. You have different choices. You're not locked in with us with wavelengths, you still have to think about who you're using. As a start I mentioned Apple, right. So it's a closed ecosystem, highly innovative space. Right. But when it comes to open system, and that's the reason why they didn't want to change to USB key earlier, you know, a few years ago because they were slowing down their innovation. Well, you have to slow down sometime with standards, you know, to be on pair with other manufacturers and then you, some of you might have been part of sdo, right? Working standard working groups and you have to listen to everybody at the table and you have to come to a common point where we think the seven pieces is the right way to dim a fixture, right. Or so on, right. Many ways. So that's the challenge with standards. So when you pick your supplier, when you pick your Dali system, you always have some nuggets, right. Some features and benefits that might slightly be different than other system. But the baseline would be compatible, right. Would be interpretable. So for us with wavelengths adding DALI to an ecosystem that already had wireless, that already had panels and wavelengths core, which is a platform, which is you don't have to use a server based platform that would be more for your beyond lighting proposals such as rtls I mentioned earlier real time tracking system and to go into the bigger world of the building, right. Contributing with APIs with sharing data and receiving data and so on. So we're Talking about beyond lighting there. But all of this is the same ecosystem. So the value of Dali was really to open the wired side of our lighting control system to a standardized and certified world of products. You know, that's awesome.
- [43:07]
B
So, all right, so let's. I guess so for people who are. We've spent a lot of time obviously talking about dall e and how you've now incorporated it into wavelengths in the pla, you know, in that platform. So why don't you give us. Give us the elevator sales pitch for people who are looking at right. Their new. Their next lighting control system. Why should, you know, if they're familiar with system A or system B, it doesn't matter. Why should they look at Cooper and look at wavelengths specifically? Moving forward, what advantages do you have in your system? It sounds like there's a bunch. Right. By being able to have wired, wireless and all these other options. But give us the elevator sales pitch. Why Cooper wavelengths?
- [43:47]
A
Yeah, if I had to tell somebody in 30 seconds, why wavelengths? The number one thing that comes in mind is it is a Cooper lighting control system that includes a lot of fixtures. Different various type of fixtures. You know, we mentioned earlier troffers down lights, outdoor fixtures strips, architectural fixtures which are more complex sometimes to control. Right. But we have a pretty solid lighting portfolio. And I hate to say that. I'll say it again, I guess one trope to choke. Right. I hate that expression. I keep on saying it. I have to figure out another expression for that. But yeah, you have one vendor, one manufacturer. So your ecosystem is coming from the same place. And it was tested, validated, and we talked about tunable y earlier. So we have a platform called Biob that does security and random. So I can tell you when I'm comparing first data between fixtures, it can be highly different when it comes to renderings and colors and spectrum results. So I know how important it is to control that space. And this is tunable wire related, but it's the same thing across the board when it comes to dimming, as we mentioned, and also maintenance of these fixtures. So one manufacturer, Cooper lighting and a wavelengths control platform. So the second one is. I know I passed 30 seconds, so hopefully you're still with me.
- [45:14]
B
Long elevator ride.
- [45:16]
A
We probably have like Empire States to go, but stay with me. Yeah. So the second one is hybrid. You do need flexibility on site. And I'm really hoping that any agencies out there. But most of our Cooper agents are maximizing results by using our flexibility with wired and wireless controls. At the end of the day, if you do a school. I'll take the school example because I started earlier with the school example. You want to have your classes with different type of room scenes. And you might want to go wiring control there, your corridors and then you have gymnasium where the distance to cover with wiring might not be practical. And you probably want to use a ZigBee solution. And then the parking lot, right. You want to wire your fixtures there. Well, power, yes, but control, probably. Not that it's easier to use your ZigBee solution if you don't. Don't need to have a sensor on the pole. You're not in California or any other places where ASHRAE 90.1 comes in. Right. As a sensor requirement for 20 foot high or low or higher. Then you might want to use a panel in that case, right? And just control your zoning by on, off, perhaps. But yeah, you want to have an hybrid solution where you can benefit from the best of the two worlds. You know, a Dali solution, maybe a cat solution or in a wireless solution, Pro solution in their case. And it looks the same from the end user standpoint. The sensors are looking the same. The wall stations, most of it are looking the same. At least we have the portfolio to cover most of it. If not, we will in a few months from now. And from an end user, it's the same thing. It's a button they're pressing and the scenes are happening the same. And all of this program with one app, you know, so you're looking at daily devices, looking at your panel, you're looking at your wireless devices or pro devices. It's. It's the same thing, the same ecosystem. So when it comes to Dall E, specifically, one of the goals I mentioned, interoperability was important for wavelength. So we added Deli. Well, the second one is, hey, we're going to make it simple and easy. You know, we don't want to hear again about Dall E1 and Dali 1 stories and nightmares that went there. No, we're not part of that anymore.
- [47:25]
C
Thank you.
- [47:26]
A
Right, so it's all DALL E2, all certified parts. But on top of that, the way you program your sites, and we did it a few times now with Dali, it is as it is was with wavelengths in the past. So it seems less, almost seems less for the end user, whoever is programming, maintaining the system. So that's the second reason hybrid. And then the Dali option, now that we just added that it's easy and simple from the same app to be done, program maintained and whatsoever comes on. Right. And then the Third one I mentioned, integrated fixtures. Fixtures, integrated sensors. Right. It's important as well. It simplifies your installer's life and also long term wise, it's easier. So the portfolio with integrated sensors is the third one.
- [48:13]
C
Well, we're almost out of time here and I just want to like package this up because I think this is fascinating stuff and I think, you know, ultimately this is where we're heading, you know, whether it's Dolly. At the end of the day, it seems like that's the case. But don't, don't, you know, put my name against that prediction. But you know, when it comes to Dall Ee, we've seen it evolve. You know, it's not the same Dali that it used to be. It is, it is a brand new kind of approach to specifically data and manufacturing when it comes to how we make Dall E work, how we make it interoperable, how we collect data. You know, we've got D4I now and Dall E if you want to go the wireless route. So there's a lot more ways of utilizing Dall E than what we had in the past and it's much beefier now. And so, you know, it's really kind of to hard heartening to see that this, that a manufacturer like Cooper is basically taking both arms and wrapping around it and saying, yeah, this is where we're heading. So we may as well embrace it at this point because of the fact that in the United States it is a very proprietary world we live in. And so to have that opportunity to connect to that interoperable communication, that open standard, while still using, utilizing a platform like Wavelengths really does give us a much more success chance within this country, especially because we don't have, you know, Dall E techs just sitting around waiting to work on projects. So to have a manufacturer basically saying, yeah, we own all the Dolly stuff, you know, our tech is going to take care of the Dali stuff, that's huge because that already takes care of some of the major pain points when it comes to just doing, doing your own homebrew Dolly system. And on top of that, you know, you can help guide some of these conversations that Ron and I were talking about in our last episode about cost of startup and programming for the project, which a lot of contractors just assume is going to be a, you know, increased amount to the project without reducing the cost of flavor or to wire or anything like that. So there's just, you know, there's a lot of education that can be benefited from this kind of approach. And so hopefully we are going to see that needle shift in this country because all of the points that we've talked about, you know, when it comes to adopting Dali, there's just, there are very few arguments left why we are staying with 0 to 10 and analog dimming and not just going full tilt into a digital lighting controls environment. And so, you know, I agree, I think you know, this is where we're heading event, you know, is it going to happen tomorrow? No. Is it going to happen five years from now? Hopefully, but eventually we will get there. And so seeing this kind of shift within our industry, especially in the US market is a really great thing to see.
- [51:22]
A
Yeah. And education is key as we mentioned a couple times. Right. So yeah, there are a few, few events happening where you can get to learn on Dali and in any systems actually. But specifically to Dali, there are a few events including there's a Dali summit coming North America summit pretty soon in September 1617 I think it's co located with the Archlight in Dallas. Not only you can learn by watching PowerPoints, which we all like to do, but you can also be hands on and really play with the system. So Cooper is going to be there and we have what we call demo kits where you can see the wireless and the wired side. And then as I said with one app program, you know the demo kits with two lights and I mean we have four lights in total. Then you have two extra lights that you can had and then sensing and then with the app you can play and create groups and pretend you're creating a class. Right. So that's a good way to learn on it and understand how easy it got with value 2. And overall as a wavelengths hybrid system, our interpreter comes in play there. So that's one occasion. And there's also great videos on the LCA portal and the places that I encourage everybody to watch. And then as I said earlier, if you didn't try, didn't get involved or maybe you got burned with the legacy Dali, just try it out, go see Dali too. And if you do a pilot, give feedback to manufacturer if it's not working well. But we all have to chime in and get it working there. So we need everybody in the valve chain and every stakeholders to be on board. So I appreciate everybody that did try it out over the past years and got burned in the ergo to do a second round of Dali project with Dali 2. But those are a few folks, I guess most of the people I talked to that did Dali two projects lately Were pretty, pretty impressed about it. And that goes beyond Dall E2 with D4i and other projects. So there's a lot of outdoor fixtures that are using D4I platforms with other vendors type sensing. And it's working really well for cities and smart cities projects. So it's out there. It's already existing. You know, it's. And it's proven too. So a lot needs to be done. Don't get me wrong, certification wise and daily wise, there's a much more, as you mentioned, coming. But we're at the point now, a turning point, as I said earlier, that definitely it solved a lot of problems that we used to have with Delhi that we don't have anymore. So.
- [53:58]
C
Awesome.
- [53:58]
B
Martin, thank you so much. Absolutely fantastic conversation. Really appreciate everything that all manufacturers, especially, you know, Cooper is are doing to really move the industry forward and try to move us in North America into these digital environments where we should be. I will tell you though, instead of one throat to choke, I prefer one phone call to make. It's a, it's a little cleaner that way. Right? That is, that is what I usually tell people. Look, we live in a proprietary world and Cooper has an expansive portfolio. So you're, you're in that, right? In a theatrical environment, we have a certain manufacturer we tend to lean towards in certain projects. So what I like to tell people is, hey, it's one phone call to make and you have all of your resources and support that you need, so it's a little easier. It probably doesn't sound as bad, so maybe consider that for when you're talking,
- [54:50]
A
I'm going to add an addendum to it. So one phone call or one chat. Yep, there you go.
- [54:56]
C
Perfect.
- [54:57]
B
Martin, thank you so much for your time.
- [54:58]
A
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
- [55:00]
B
Awesome. I will close this out and remind everyone. Today's episode is presented by the lca, the Lighting Controls Academy.
- [55:06]
C
And it's an official podcast of nailed, the national association of Innovative Lighting Distributors. Check out our website, lightingcontrolspodcast.com got all of our episodes and a whole lot more. But huge shout out to Cooper, who is our sponsor for this episode and their new wavelengths Dall E platform. If you haven't heard enough about it, I highly recommend you check out their website. They've got some really good stuff on there, like case studies for, for how you can implement it and all of the ways that you can think of hybridizing Dall E into either an existing or new wavelengths platform. So definitely check it out. Cooper lighting.com thank you so much for joining me. And Martin, thank you. This was an awesome conversation.