If you can cast your mind back to the 2017 edition of the Lux Awards you may remember that one of our senior designers, Gary Thornton, won the category for Connected Lighting Concept of the Year!
Part of Gary's prize was a trip to Florida to visit the award sponsor Gooee and he recently posted an article about the trip on LinkedIn. Here is a taster of a how it went...
"After the introduction and office tour it was pretty much down to business. One of Gooee’s Solutions Architects Sam Hall spent much of the week working with me to understand what my app concept was all about, what I was looking for it to do, and what we could hope to achieve in just a few days.
Having outlined everything we followed a typical project brief of iterating wireframes and flow charts on the whiteboards, eventually whittling the process down to what looked like a fairly efficient and attainable programme. Working with Sam and Gooee CTO Simon Coombes we had settled on an overly-simplified and single-use scenario of what the full app would do, but in doing so it would give us an achievable goal and, if successful, a working proof-of-concept prototype that we hoped could be achieved in the time we had."
Gary and Sam Hall iterating the workflow of the app
"We borrowed a framework from a previous Gooee-related app to give us a head start and set ourselves up to connect to the available lamps they had which were part of the Aurora AOne range. A paired back version of functionality was what we were aiming to achieve, and so dimming levels and CCT were the focus. Varying the spectral composition of light fixtures is part of the ultimate goal but that will have to wait for another time when we have some preferred fixtures available.
During our time there we made three visits to the Test Centre that Gooee have, two would probably have been sufficient but on one visit the power to the building cut out as we walked through the door meaning that there wasn’t much to do or see other than wait for a number of gateways and light fixtures to re-boot and re-connect.
Rather than be defeated about such issues, it is real-world scenarios like this which allow Gooee to test and gather data on how a system responds and reboots, aspects that you just couldn’t capture on a small bench test. And that’s before you even consider that the modest looking building houses some fifty test rigs, running 400+ light fixtures (their own and those from partners), measures 3,400 data points, 24 hours a day. Oh, and it’s patrolled by six autonomous robots!"
Gary and Gooee CTO Simon Coombes discuss light fixture testing within the facility
"Proudly by the end of the working week we had set of code running that simulated exactly what we set out to do. A fully working set that not only met our design intent, but that addressed my specific scenario of a five hour offset from London to Florida and ran an automated, albeit condensed, lighting scenario tailored to me and targeted to meet my need to effectively lessen the effects of jet lag. The idea being to help me phase shift and entrain my circadian rhythm to the local time zone in a shorter period of time than I would naturally have adjusted."
Code running an example scenario to the light fixtures via a mobile application
The full article and contact details for Gary on anything regarding his app can be found on his LinkedIn profile here.