Curt @ Atari Museum wrote:
That is true, they last longer and would save a heck
of a lot of
maintenance
Right. Instead of a single bulb, there are many smaller LEDs, and the
biggest benefit is that they all don't fail at the same time. This
makes them much safer. I don't know what the MTBF is on those things
but I've seen a couple burned out in some of the lights around here.
... I always thought like 10-15 years ago "when
will they
make traffic lights and street lights smart enough that when they fail,
a signal is sent so that someone will come and fix them..."
I used to talk to the technical people in charge of these types of
projects in city/county/etc government. This isn't all that new,
either. They've used RS422 and RS485 and run copper twisted pair
between the lights, and then home run single mode fiber back to the
centralized building.
I got involved w/ them because they wanted to "network"-ify these old
light controllers. The newer controllers are ethernet-based. I gave
them a solution to transmit serial over tcp/ip, and then use small
network switches that would use the legacy single mode. The advantage
there was that they'd now have ethernet in these street-side boxes which
made things like network-based cameras easy to connect.
These switches had two single mode fiber ports (or multimode for shorter
distances) and then around 6-8 copper 10/100 ports. What made them
great for these types of projects is that they were industrial
temperature rated. They were -50C to +100C rated, and designed for long
term use at -40C to +75C.
At the central location, they had big monitoring screens where they
could see the status of every light, and have live video of the
intersections. Pretty neat.
I would think that with their new low power lights
there
would then come the eventual Wifi status transmitter that would send out
a functional status of a light, traffic signal, etc that could all come
into a center monitoring station and know when something fails.
Yup. I designed some of these types of networks too! Especially nice
when they already have some of municipality wide wifi installed.
Keith