This is a short write up about my experience with early Philips LED fixtures. What seemed to be straight forward turned into a deeper rabbit hole than I initially expected.
The goal was simple. Somehow get dimming working on my LED fixtures, such that they can be used indoors comfortably (don't get me wrong, it is cool and all to have 100 W worth of lighting power on your wall, but most of the time it is simply overkill). When I bought the fixtures, I had a short talk with the seller about DALI and what it can be used for. While it's a nice system, getting a full fledged DALI network running is a rather expensive endeavor. Nevertheless, it peaked my interest; it would be nice if I could use my phone to turn the fixtures on and off, control their brightness, either automatically with programmed cycles or as a reaction to some trigger. If "regular" light was needed, the fixture could operate at more or less 15% brightness, but when more light is required, I could easily adjusted the brightness.
A short Google search revealed: all drivers installed in my fixtures support DALI. Great! So the next step was to find something that would act as a DALI controller and send out the commands. While looking for something affordable, I came across a Zigbee to DALI converter from OSRAM. This looked very promising, since I already use Zigbee for some very basic home automation. The nice thing about Zigbee is that is purpose built, uses different frequency bands than WI-FI (at least in Europe and in the US) and allows for mesh networks natively. But the best property of Zigbee, at least in my opinion, is that it works without internet access and without an annoying cloud subscription to some duct taped mess of a "platform" from a vendor that most likely will discontinue it in a few years or will be hacked since security is often an afterthought (or so it seams). For stuff like home automation, vendor independence is crucial. But I digress. After some more research, I decided to give it a shot and ordered the Zigbee to DALI converter.
Once the converter arrived, I hooked everything up to the cheapest fixture I had (a BGP060), so that in case something went wrong it wouldn't have been a big loss. Everything looked good, the converter was recognized by my existing system, but neither dimming nor turning the fixture on or off worked. At first I thought maybe the converter had issues. However, my other fixtures had the same behavior - in that there was no reaction what so ever to the issued DALI commands. This was rather disappointing, especially since the converter hadn't been that cheap. So it was time to do some more research. While reading more on Philips (now Signify) and their drivers I stumbled upon a brochure that mentioned the ability of the driver to be programmed. This was the point it started to dawn on me. Most likely the driver would need to be programmed to enable DALI based dimming. Shortly after I found the MultiOne Software suite, which offers tooling for OEMs to program Philips drivers and integrate them into their own products. To my surprise, this software can be downloaded at no cost, together with its user manual. The latter confirmed that these drivers worked more like modern cars: They have all the features built into the hardware, but software decides which features can actually be used.
Unfortunately, for the software to work, a special interface was required. Signify offers two different types: A DALI based one and a NFC based one. Signify calls the latter "SimpleSet". Since most of my drivers did not offer said feature, the DALI based one was a requirement. Around the same time I discovered MultiOne Mobile too. It's an app for your phone that allows for some bare bones configuration changes, like setting the overall output level and see some stats (for example operation time). Being able to reduce the output level to a fixed value was a good first step, but it's a subpar experience at best compared to full dimming. So I had to get the interface if I wanted the real deal. There was only one slight problem: The Signify OEM web shop (as the name suggests) was business to business only. Fortunately, a friend of mine helped me out with this and ordered the interface for me. It took about week to arrive.
So, did the interface do what it promised? Absolutely! After connecting everything together, MultiOne found the driver of the connected fixture (still the BGP060). This revealed a few things: The fixture had been running for only around 8000 hours, and that there was indeed no dimming configured. A quick change in the selection menu and one write command later, the fixture could be dimmed via DALI without any problems. I repeated this for all my other fixtures and made an interesting discovery: The fixture already mounted on my wall (see this post
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-241344 and this one
https://www.lighting-gallery.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-241427) was sold to me as a 50 W fixture, and it did indeed consume 50 W when operating. When changing the dimming mode to DALI (it had been set to "LineSwitch"), it became a good bit brighter than before, now consuming 100 W. In hindsight, this made total sense, since the configuration for LineSwitch was set to start at 50% output. So when no control signal was present, the lamp would only operate at this output level.
Overall, this was way more involved than anticipated. But it was an rewarding journey nevertheless, since all my LED fixtures can be dimmed now
. However, this project is not done yet. Getting the Zigbee to DALI adapter to work nicely in HomeAssistant requires some more work.
Here are Links to all the things I mentioned:
Zigbee to DALI Converter:
https://www.inventronics-light.com/ecat/Zigbee%203.0%20DALI%20CONV%20LI-Converters-Components-Light%20management%20systems-OSRAM%20Products/com/en/GPS01_3152271/MultiOne Software and Manuals:
https://www.signify.com/global/support/tools/multione-configuratorUSB to DALI Interface:
https://www.emea.oemwebshop.signify.com/lcn8600-multione-interface-dali.htmlHomeAssistant:
https://www.home-assistant.io/Lastly, thank you very much for reading my write up! If you have any questions, i'll be happy to try to answer them.
