The town of Scarborough in Maine, in the US, has migrated its smart street lights onto a cloud management platform from California-headquartered Dhyan Networks and Technologies, and away from smart lighting company Echelon.
The firm said its central management software (CMS) has allowed the town to identify various network and hardware issues, and to ‘load balance’ its gateways and stabilize its network. The town of Scarborough had previously used Echelon, acquired by IoT semiconductor firm Adesto Technologies in 2018, for its CMS, which was appointed with its move to LED lighting in the same year.
The 2018 review was led by local firm Colby Company Engineering, with LED lights by Cree Lighting, and was pegged to save Scarborough $92,000 a year in lease payments and up to $41,000 a year in delivery and energy supply costs. A press statement from Dhyan, the latest CMS supplier, made no explanation for the new migration, but described the transition as “smooth”.
The Efficiency Network (TEN), part of New York energy services company DLH, has handled the town’s latest streetlight upgrades. Dhyan’s central management software for smart lighting and smart city applications includes LightMan for managing ‘smart area’ lights such as in auto dealerships, campuses, and warehouses, StreetMan for managing smart streetlights, and CitiMan for managing smart city IoT assets.
Scarborough has taken the StreetMan platform, which supports street-lighting protocols including TALQ, OSCP, MQTT, and communication technologies such as Zigbee, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, Powerline, and sundry cellular technologies. Dhyan stated: “It lets cities and municipalities manage, monitor, and control a variety of smart street assets such as streetlights, cameras, access points, charging stations, billboards, and IoT sensors.”
Stephen Buckley, deputy director of public works for Scarborough, said: “Dhyan successfully migrated LumInsight, our Echelon Cloud CMS, to their StreetMan CMS without any data loss or disruption, and they did it fully remotely, from thousands of miles away, without a single truck roll. With Dhyan’s StreetMan central management software we have excellent visibility into the health of each and every streetlight which we believe will enable us to significantly lower our streetlight maintenance expenses. StreetMan’s GUI is intuitive and easy to use, and we are impressed at the depth of the information it provides.”
Prakash Ramadass, vice president of smart cities at Dhyan, said: “Streetlights are one of the largest expenses for any city. Converting streetlights from older technology to LED can save a good deal of money,” he added, “but by adding smart controllers and a sophisticated central management software such as StreetMan, the savings can be increased even further by giving the city the ability to dim the streetlights on demand and by enabling them to do proactive maintenance.”
