| dc.description.abstract | The demand for energy is increasing day by day, while at the same time people are becoming more aware of the impact the large energy consumption has on the global environment. Street lights are a major part of the modern infrastructure and consumes a lot of energy. Recently it has become more of a focus to optimize the use of energy, thus it natural to take a look on street lights and optimize their energy consumption. This thesis presents the work done to design and implement an industrial light controller for street light applications, to be installed together with each light pole. The whole product development process is presented all the way from the idea, to the development of the product requirements, to hardware and software design, prototyping and finally testing of the finished device. The developed device has wireless capabilities which connects it to the Internet of Things, and by using various sensors available, allows for smarter control algorithms which will reduce the total energy consumption. There are currently over 280 million street lights in the world, and even smaller cities can have several thousands of light poles. The device developed has to be manufacturable at large quantities and have a low enough unit price, for an upgrade to even be considered by cities and municipalities. Due to this, a significant amount of work was done to optimize the device for automatic manufacturing in large quantities. The finished device proved to be able to control modern street lights and capable of forming a wireless mesh network with maximum distances between the devices exceeding 125m. The device was also able to keep track of time for at least 14 days without being powered from the mains voltage grid, which is important for autonomous control in the case of a networking failure. | en |
