Infrastructure specialist, Urban Control has partnered with Nordic Semiconductor to produce an IoT LED streetlight luminaire controller that can be networked for control by any central management system (CMS) based on the TALQ standard, the smart city standard developed by the TALQ Consortium.
Set for initial deployment in April 2022, each Urban Node 324 Cellular city streetlight LED luminaire controller includes a Nordic Semiconductor nRF9160 multi-mode NB-IoT / LTE-M system-in-package (SiP). The controller plugs into an industry-standard Zhaga LED lighting socket. The controller is connected over the local cellular IoT network and remotely controlled by any smart city CMS.
The operational simplicity of each Urban Node 324 comes from them being engineered to work via a lightweight machine to machine (LwM2M) platform called Alaska from IoTerop. The platform leverages the two most common smart city IoT standards: uCIFI and TALQ and uses embedded design engineering to minimise on-air bandwidth and reduce power consumption to levels sufficient to support battery-powered smart city sensors and devices.
The use of standard cellular technology means that Urban Node 324 Cellular can be deployed immediately and is cost-effective for small and distributed lighting estates. It can be used to deliver intelligent control to streetlights in retail parks, hotel chains, office and warehouse developments, and across rail infrastructure such as stations, car parks and good yards.
Urban Control Urban Node 324 Cellular controllers allow the user the ability to precisely control brightness and therefore energy consumption and costs. It has the ability to dynamically respond to sudden changes in pedestrian numbers or road traffic, to monitor energy consumption in real-time and identify and even pre-empt faults to efficiently co-ordinate maintenance staff to reduce operating costs.
Intelligent, centrally controlled streetlights offer many benefits. Light output can be adapted to precisely what is needed, and they can respond dynamically to changes in pedestrian footfall or road traffic. In doing so, they reduce energy costs, carbon emissions and light pollution.
“Unlike traditional smart city lighting installations that require a specialised network to be built, the Urban Node 324 Cellular works straight out-of-the-box just like a smartphone,” says Miguel Lira, Urban Control’s innovation and development director. “This makes it commercially and technologically viable for any size installation because it does not require the operator to build their own wireless IoT network or become a wireless IoT network operator themselves.” The system is scalable with the capability to be used for small clusters of streetlights all the way up to massive, multi-million node capital city-sized installations, he says. “This is truly a game changer in the smart city streetlighting industry.”
Lorenzo Amicucci, business development manager at Nordic Semiconductor, agrees. “Moving away from proprietary solutions towards devices which are ready straight out of the box and leverage cellular networks that are already deployed in every town, city and significant population centre around the world, devices like Urban Node 324 can make anywhere smart more quickly and for less cost.”
