The city of Portland in Maine, in the US, has migrated its smart street lights onto a cloud management platform (CMS) from California-headquartered Dhyan Networks and Technologies, and away from smart lighting company Echelon. It is the same switchover carried out by the town of Scarborough, also in Maine, six months back. The change was conducted remotely.
Portland has moved from the LumInsight CMS from Echelon, acquired by IoT semiconductor firm Adesto Technologies in 2018, to Dhyan’s tech-agnostic and vendor-neutral StreetMan platform, which supports standard protocols such as TALQ, OSCP, MQTT, HTTP and communication technologies including Zigbee, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT, and powerline communications (PLC). Support for LumInsight, its cloud CMS, was withdrawn by Adesto with its purchase of Echelon.
The StreetMan CMS provides management support for additional smart-city sensors, including cameras, access points, charging stations, connected billboards, and sundry environmental monitors. These can be loaded into the streetlight modules, or attached elsewhere to city infrastructure. Dhyan works in the smart cities and smart grid markets commonly, as well as with telecoms providers.
Its StreetMan platform is for managing smart streetlights; its LightMan and CitiMan platforms are geared for managing ‘smart area’ lights such as in auto dealerships, campuses, and warehouses, and for managing smart city IoT assets, respectively. The StreetMan platform has been combined variously, elsewhere, with smart streetlight gateways from the likes of Flashnet, Itron, LuxSave, Paradox, and Sicom.
Besser Lighting has supplied Siemens in Santa Catarina City, in Mexico, new LEDs for its warehouse, managed by the LightMan system. The Siemens warehouse was also upgraded, with the move to LEDs, from an Echelon CMS. LightMan provisioned smart LEDs with zero-touch auto-provisioning. All nodes and multiple gateways were up and running in just two days, the story goes.
The Efficiency Network (TEN), part of New York energy services company DLH, handled the latest streetlight upgrades in Portland, as it did in Scarborough. Dhyan said the Portland upgrade will allow the city to optimize the distribution of controllers between gateways resulting in a more reliable radio network and the ability to isolate faulty controllers from those with communication issues.
Jon Jennings, city manager in Portland, said: “Dhyan successfully migrated LumInsight, our Echelon Cloud CMS, to their StreetMan CMS without any data loss or disruption. It was able to accomplish this fully remotely, from thousands of miles away, without a single onsite visit. This partnership helps us further achieve our sustainability goals while also reducing costs and achieving efficiencies. Our team can now diagnose problems from their desktops and share that information with technicians so they are fully prepared to make the necessary repairs in the field.”
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, but by adding smart controllers and a sophisticated central management system 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.”
