Challenge

The client is a Finnish company that offers smart lighting control solutions to its customers, including city councils, stadium owners, etc. The main goal of the client is to provide convenient solutions for remote lightning management that would allow to monitor and manage lighting devices anytime and anywhere.

The client has launched its company over 10 years ago and since then, no changes were made to the existing system. Hence, the client approached SoftTeco with a request not only to update the system but also to introduce new features that were requested by the customers.

Solution

C2 Smart Light is an IoT product that allows its users to remotely control needed lightning devices. With the help of the product, users can not only turn the devices on and off but also manage the dimming level, make lightning adjustments, monitor the status of the devices, and many other options.

One of the greatest advantages of the solution is that it creates control programs for lighting networks. These programs include automatic adjustment of the light intensity based on the time of the year, time of the day, natural light level, etc. In this way, the intensity of lighting depends on the external environment and the lighting devices do not have to run at full power all the time. This leads to significant energy saving (up to 20%) and reduces CO2 emissions.

The product is a web application that provides an intuitive and informative interface to the user. With the help of the integrated map, a user can instantly see all their connected devices on the map and manage them with a few clicks only. In this way, the solution significantly facilitates device monitoring and management and provides accurate data to the users.

How It Works

The biggest issue with the existing system was the lack of scalability. It was also very outdated and the client wanted us to fix that. What SoftTeco did was creating a new backend that serves as an intermediary between the old backend and the frontend part of the application. We opted for this solution because it would take too much time and resources to redesign the existing backend. Plus, it was already efficiently communicating with the relays so it was a better option to keep it the way it was.

The development of a new backend allowed us to achieve the needed scalability. The implementation of the new functionality was done through the new backend as well. Among the features that we added were the dimming index management and the motion sensors management.

The client also requested to make the existing system TALQ-compatible. This turned out to be a real challenge since the SoftTeco team did not have access to real TALQ devices during our work. Nevertheless, we managed to successfully resolve the issue by working with the integration protocol and TALQ test tool only. Now the system is fully compatible with TALQ and can be used to manage TALQ devices.

Results:

SoftTeco has successfully updated and scaled the existing smart lighting system and delivered all necessary implementations on time and in full correspondence with the requirements. We are glad that we were able to work on a challenging IoT project and contribute to smart city development.