A digitally wireless dimmable lighting system for two-area fluorescent lamps

The digitally dimming control method is suitable for lighting application in buildings, offices, conference rooms and classrooms, and it features remote control capability. The conventional RS-232-based digitally dimmable lighting system for two-area fluorescent lamps consists of two power factor correctors and two half-bridge resonant inverters as the main circuit, and a microcontroller-based driver and two drivers/dimmers for two inverters. The drawbacks of the conventional lighting system are limited transmission length and transmission speed, and each lighting area needs its own driver and dimmer, which results in a large number of circuit components and low cost-effectiveness for application of multi-area lighting control for fluorescent lamps. Therefore, this paper presents a digitally wireless dimmable lighting system for fluorescent lamps. The main purpose of this paper is to utilize USB-based protocol instead of the RS-232-based one and increase dimming controlled nodes (devices) with the use of ZigBee transmission interface, which is a new wireless communication technology. In addition, a micro-controller is adopted to fulfill remote wireless dimming controlled electronic lighting system for two area fluorescent lamps. A prototypical electronic lighting system has been developed to drive a 32W-rated (T8-type) fluorescent lamp for each area with the use of a LabVIEW man-machine interface software to carry out the remote dimming control. The experimental results demonstrate the functionality of the presented electronic lighting system.