Click below to hear Randy Reid, Editor of the EdisonReport and DMF’s VP of Engineering Rushi Kumar cover all the basics of the DALI 2 protocol and its applications.
Some Highlights:
Q: What is DALI?
A: DALI is really just a simple lighting control protocol. So what that means is: it’s a predefined set of commands to control lighting fixtures. So as with TRIAC dimming or phase dimming which everyone is familiar with, instead of changing the amount of power going to the fixture we send explicit commands to tell it to do something. Or as with 0 to 10 volt you send a control voltage, but with DALI, again, you send a specific command to tell it to go to a level. i.e to raise or to lower or to even change the actual color temperature.
Q: How does the installation change with DALI?
A: So that’s really where the big difference is. DALI uses the same type of wiring as 0 to
10 volt. So you’ll have your main’s conductors: your hot, neutral, and ground going to each fixture and then you’ll have two additional wires that are for communication. The difference is how it gets zoned. With 0 to 10 volts you’re physically zoning each of the lighting circuits by running a separate wire for each and every lighting zone back to a dimmer or a dimmer output.
With DALI you run the same set of wires to all the fixtures on the DALI Network.
Q: What are the basic system limits when designing a DALI system?
A: Well there are only a couple of really hard rules to follow: One is the number of fixtures that can be on a DALI Loop or a DALI network, and that’s 64 fixtures. The next rule is really the number of zones of control. So essentially those 64 fixtures on a DALI output need to be assigned to one of 16 different zones and those zones are what specifically are getting controlled.
So each DALI output is essentially a 16 channel dimmer.
Watch the full video above for an even deeper dive!
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