Lighting control firmware looks to future-proof networks

Delivered over-the-air and free of charge, Evolution is intended to enhance levels of security and provide advanced feature capabilities that will help to future-proof pre-installed Casambi Ready devices that are operating across existing networks.

Evolution can be applied to all luminaires, drivers and lighting control devices based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 chip and across the Casambi ecosystem. For Casambi products, the firmware is available for the CBM-002, CBU-PWM4, CBU-ASR, CBU-DCS, CBU-TED (manufactured from 3 January 2019 onwards), CBU-ASD (1 June 2018 onwards), and the Xpress (13 March 2019 onwards). When upgrading, all network settings are maintained.

“This latest Evolution firmware upgrade underlines why the Casambi ecosystem is the de facto Bluetooth lighting control standard,” said Timo Pakkala, co-founder of Casambi. “In addition to delivering advanced capabilities, Evolution demonstrates that Casambi is a leading end-to-end lighting control provider offering a seamless firmware upgrade path.”

Supporting up to eight Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) channels, Evolution offers better operational performance to users, taking advantage of four times more RAM chip memory to store new configuration data, such as additional scenes and timers. The new firmware also delivers an enhanced security model.

With this firmware upgrade, information on the condition and priority level of a Casambi device is now transferred through the Bluetooth mesh network, enabling detailed information to be visible remotely. This can be used to communicate that it has overheated, for example, or if there is a configuration failure or a missing driver.

Evolution will run on any hardware platform that is based on the nRF52 and currently running Classic firmware version 25.0 or above. Backwards compatibility is maintained with previous versions of firmware, giving greater design flexibility to Casambi’s ecosystem manufacturing partners and to lighting professionals who are using the multi-award winning control solution in their products.

While Casambi can manage an unlimited number of luminaires across an unlimited number of networks, the firmware upgrade boosts the number of ‘Casambi Ready’ devices that can operate within each single mesh network from 127 (the number attained when using Casambi’s Classic firmware) to 250 – an increase of more than 96%.