How to build a wireless street lighting system | Hacker News Reader

How to build a wireless street lighting system

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48 pointsadunk19 comments

Or just turn them off and enjoy more beautiful night skies, less blue spectrum light interrupting your sleep, healthier wildlife, and reduced energy usage with most likely no negative effects.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/29/turning-off-...

Indeed. Slovenia, for example, has great anti light-pollution laws.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11220636

Visited Ljubljana for New Years' a few years ago and loved it. Yet another reason to visit again!

Narrow-band-amber-LEDs and SOX would avoid the blue light problem.

Being able to dim LED street lights would be very useful, and not just for the power savings.

Many of the new LED street lights here in London are far too bright - to the point of being dazzling and irritating to pedestrians. It's especially annoying when you have them shining directly into your house!

I understand the safety advantages of having ultra-bright white lights at busy throughfares and intersections, but on quiet residential streets they are more than annoying and harmful to the character of our neighbourhoods.

Nearly all of the most recent LED street lights can be dimmed. Though, for most, it's something that done locally and generally at the time of installation. You may be able to get someone to either 1) adjust the brightness, or 2) adjust the lamp so that it shines less into your house.

If it was shining into my house I'd certainly be trying to get this done!

My my complaint is more general: Some council boffin has decided that using ultra-bright lights would improve safety, but actually they can have the opposite effect - by being blinding and dazzling to pedestrians, drivers and cyclists.

A redesign of the lighting units (perhaps with some kind of lens or diffuser) would probably help too, so that the light is diffused more and you aren't looking directly into the LED elements.

Are you sure about that? Almost all the new installations, at least in the UK, are remote controlled by tech from Telensa or others.

Aren't existing street lights already remotely controlled with the control signals modulated onto the power line? I am less sure about a back channel but I am pretty sure street lights are not turned on by simply turning on the power.

Most are turned on locally by a photocell mounted on the street light.

There is then probably considerable variation from place to place, but in Germany they usually follow a schedule turning on and off at specific times. It is also not uncommon that every second or so street light gets turned off late in the night. Sometimes they also turn on outside of the usual hours if it is especially dark due to dense clouds or heavy snowfall but I can not really tell whether this is sensed locally at the street light or centrally controlled.

EDIT: Just checked the German Wikipedia article and at least here all kinds of different systems with varying levels of granularity and autonomy are in use. Some cities seemingly even installed systems that allow turning on the street lights in specific streets or areas on demand via call or SMS during the late night.

In Germany the most common is centrally controlled. Usually a couple streets are connected to a controller, which is either triggered by a signal modulated over the regular mains from the local power provider or a central sensor, or triggered by a sensor connected to the controller.

It's usually not individual lamps, but large streets, blocks, or entire neighborhoods at once.

Some are controlled remote using unidirectional long range radio, called "Funkrundsteuertechnik".

I am curious about how the mesh topology based on Launchpad is superior to typical star topology LoRa.

It looks like each Launchpad is $30 (multiple per light?) and Pi Zero W is $10, yet an ESP32 development board with LoRa is about $10. Given that street lights have a constant power source the communication challenges seem like they would be easy compared to when such devices are economizing every milliwatt hour. They could be set to always receive, and send small packets to a nearby peers to be relayed in very short windows.

Let's save half a led worth energy some of the time by adding always on wireless router and computer to each street light.

Seems to me someone failed at basic math and logic here.

there's only a tiny microcontroller and radio added per light. the power consumption of this additional technology is on the order of milliamps at 3v. this is minuscule compared to the LEDs themselves.

everything comes back around. i worked in a startup in 2002 and we developed a mesh network street light controller. https://web.archive.org/web/20020605214609/http://www.telemi...

Why no ambient light sensors for automatic dimming and only report lamps with weird voltages (shorted or burned out LEDs)?

That's generally how they work today: each street light has an ambient light sensor on top and switches itself on and off automatically. Occasionally you see one that's staying on all the time, presumably because the sensor isn't working.

I haven't seen any that do automatic dimming, however. That would be a nice feature.

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