The DALI lighting protocol is causing huge software problems

Hello,
Ive noted that in many co’s that I go to, the software engineers cannot manage the DALI lighting protocol. There are DALI libraries which are pre-written, and these cause massive troubles.
There is something badly amiss here…….dimming lights and turning them on or off should not be difficult. Isn’t it time that a new , simplified lighting protocol is made?
Who made the DALI protocol in the first place?

"A Camel is a Horse designed by a committee" comes to mind. It was actually conceived by a partnership of lighting companies who saw the need for a central control mechanism but it was based on the lighting available at the time and was seriously deficient in some respects even then. It should have been thought out more clearly to allow for expansion to emerging technologies, especially in the area of device and group addressing.

Simple voltage modulation of the supply was never going to be easy and is prone to errors. A far better method would have been to superimpose a low level, low frequency carrier on the line with proper data recovery and error protection, something akin to DMX but for distributed lighting systems. DALI also has very limited detection of which devices are connected to the controller. A system of unique addresses per device would go a long way to making it far more versatile and would allow automatic configuration.

Having said that, the existing DALI protocol should be very simple to implement in software so I'm not sure why it causes issues. I suspect the problems you observe are more to do with the interaction of software and hardware than the programming alone.

Brian.

Thanks, we've found that our software guys are struggling to manage the utterly huge DALI software libraries.