gridComm, a provider of complete smart street lighting solutions that create networks over a city's power lines, enabling the transformation of the traditional street lights into smart street light IoT devices, saving millions of dollars in electricity and maintenance costs per year, today announced the launch of its hybrid SLC-500-HN NEMA Smart Light Controller device.
The SLC-500-HN, the world's first hybrid smart street light controller, is a critical Smart City component laying the foundation for a city-wide sensor network to be implemented via the street light and power line infrastructure. Attaching the SLC-500-HN on top of a NEMA-socket-ready lamp is all that is required to make a lamp "smart". The SLC-500-HN works in conjunction with gridComm Master Light Controller (MLC) and gridComm Street Light Management Software (SLMS) forming a complete smart street light control and management system enabling it to perform remote switching On/Off and dimming control of the street lights from the central command and control office. Working conditions of street lights are also monitored real-time by means of metering of the power consumption, current, voltage, and power factor of the individual lamps. This increases productivity by reducing the need for manual checking of lights, and facilitates the timely repair of faulty lights.
Based on hybrid Power Line Communications-LoRa technology, the SLC-500-HN is designed to work completely out-of-the-box with ultimate flexibility to operate over either power line channels or wireless channel or both. The underlying technology is gridComm's flagship GC2200 Power Line Communication (PLC) transceiver which works in a wide range of noise-prone power line environments guaranteeing superior communication performance. By leveraging its unique 18-PLC-channel architecture, the add-on wireless channel serves as the 19th channel to provide extremely reliable communications with high redundancy while ensuring connectivity with street lights and IoT sensors on different power line networks or batteries. This has the advantage of seamlessly providing a unified network system with a common set of ID and protocol.
The SLC-500-HN comes with 10KV surge protection. It has been successfully field-trialed and deployed in Taoyuan of Taiwan on existing street lights through collaboration with gridComm's master distributor, ASYS. Critical deployments have been earmarked to happen in wider scale in Taiwan later this year. Fresh from winning the Smart City Innovation Challenge Vietnam competition in Nov 2017, gridComm is working with a local system integrator to mass deploy the SLC-500-HN in three Vietnamese provinces in 2018.
"The SLC-500-HN is first of its kind specially designed to solve smart street lighting IoT sensor network connectivity issues enabling scalability in volume. This makes installation of smart street lighting really easy since engineers are not required to be on-site to perform configurations and tuning. We are very excited to see early product endorsement from our partners and customers. We expect many more deployments with the SLC-500-HN in near future", said Nge Tuck Long, Founder, VP Sales & System Engineering.
"We are proud and honored to be the first party to create a footprint for gridComm SLC-500-HN NEMA Smart Street Light Controller in Taiwan. While the actual deployment site was powered with different power line networks, the entire installation process was swift and easy. The street lights automatically networked with the Master Light Controller upon powering up of the system. We were extremely impressed with how quickly and reliably the streetlights were networked together showing up over the Street Light Management Software", said Kevin Hsieh, Executive Assistant to President of ASYS Taiwan.