Web Application for Managing Lighting

A web application for managing lighting

A new collaboration with a company specialising in the design and production of standard and emergency lighting systems.

Summary

The company required a web platform for managing the lighting systems in office and warehouse spaces, using dedicated networking devices in the form of Wi-Fi communication. MakoLab’s engineers created and built a solution enabling industrial companies to monitor, control and manage the lighting installed in selected areas, such as shop floors, warehouses and offices. It allows users to manage lights singly or by group via a website which features a log system, graphics for work schedule planning, control over lighting times and light intensity, and a rapid lamp identification mechanism. All the functionalities developed by the MakoLab team were implemented for standard and emergency lighting configurations.

Client

Industry

Manufacturing

Service

Solution delivery

Deliverables

Web application

A new collaboration with a company specialising in the design and production of standard and emergency lighting systems.

Details

The goal

Our goal was to write and develop a web application which would allow the end user to manage and control lamps via a router.

A number of functionalities were required:

controlling single lamps; registration in, and deregistration from, the system, turning them on and off, adding lamps to a group or removing them from it, changing the power consumption;
controlling groups of lamps; as above;
monitoring and verifying the logs from the router
controlling the movement of the signals sent to the lamps;
controlling the lighting shown on a current plan of a building or area;
monitoring the work of the lamps/groups of lamps/system;
monitoring the power consumption of the lamps/groups of lamps/system.

It was also necessary for our engineers to develop a log system which would record all the information concerning the operation of the lighting in the databases. Another requirement was for the precise verification of the signals sent and received by the Wi-Fi router. This was to be achieved by analysing the operation of every command issued from the website.

Project stages

building the library for communicating with the router;
implementing the commands for managing single lamps;
implementing the commands for managing groups of lamps;
creating the module responsible for the logs;
creating the module responsible for the work and power consumption statistics;
implementing the commands for managing the lamp switches (KNX and activator);
creating the module responsible for managing the lamps on the graphic plan.

The technologies used for deploying the technology were Net 5, Net 6 and Vue.js 2. The environment was integrated on the basis of the Bitbucket service.

The solution

The first, crucial stage of the work was to build a library for communicating with the router. Every command, or functionality, which we implemented was also connected with writing unit tests and with manual tests on the real devices provided to MakoLab by the client.

The application we developed connects with the router via which communication is carried out by sending signals containing low-level commands. In effect, what MakoLab’s developers did was to create and enable the translation of the commands sent and received into the C# programming language.

The functionalities meet all the client’s requirements. Users can also observe and analyse the system operations, as well as the times when lighting is in use and the power consumption involved. In addition, lamps can be controlled automatically, in line with a schedule established on the website.

Highlights

There is no limit to the number of lamps which the user can manage with the system.