Executive Summary

After working with Calvium on a series of workshops in order to test ideas and develop a prototype, smart lighting systems company enModus progressed to develop a mobile app that could improve their service offering.

enModus is a Smart Buildings Technology company that enables the monitoring, control and internet connectivity of any device that is mains powered. They have pioneered a powerline technology called ‘Wattwave’, that leverages the existing cabling infrastructure in a building.

Challenges

Whilst enModus were running field trials with their customers using Wattwave, they came across a challenge which is common in the industry:

Once you have installed your smart lighting fixtures into the ceiling, how do you know which light on the ceiling maps to which item on your computer screen?

This process, known as ‘commissioning’, would take a considerable amount of time, especially in large areas such as factory floors. The implications of this meant that enModus’ customers were having to undergo a slow, unreliable and expensive process.

How Calvium Helped

To combat these in-field challenges, enModus approached Calvium for help with the design and build of an app to ease the commissioning process for their installation engineers.

The first stage of this work involved a discovery workshop with us, where enModus presented their findings from previous trials and their ideas for possible solutions. Together, we came up with a comprehensive specification to begin working from.

The result of this process and workshop was the Smart Lighting Commissioning App, that makes the mapping and grouping of physical lighting fixtures to digital IDs fast, easy and reliable.

The development of the App was not without challenges. During the build, Calvium had no access to the actual hardware, plus the system the app needed to communicate with was being actively worked on during development, so we couldn’t always rely on it to test.

But working closely with enModus developers and using our technical expertise, we were able to mock up versions of their APIs so we could work on these when the real API was not available.

We also found that no one method of finding a light fixture would work in every single case. Our solution to this issue was to design a series of different methods including; binary search, serial number search and even a laser pointer test!

Results

Following the workshop and subsequent development process, enModus now have a solution to the main issue they had in their service offering.

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