Dynalite

Control system developed in Sydney

Philips Dynalite (previously Dynalite) is a lighting control and automation system developed in Sydney, Australia by John Gunton in 1987.

In 2009, Dynalite was acquired by Philips Lighting, and henceforth took on its new name, Philips Dynalite. In 2018 Philips spun off its lighting department, which rebranded to become Signify N. V.

Philips Dynalite is Signify's global brand for connected lighting control and building automation. Its products are available globally through Signify's extensive network of Certified System Integrators (CSIs).

The network components are all used to set a system of Areas and Channels. Any given lighting, fan, louvre, and relay circuit is a Channel in an Area. For example, a house might have 3 rooms. Each room is called an Area. The kitchen may contain overhead lights, a range hood fan and lights over the bench. These three are called Channels. Those Areas and Channels are in states called Presets. In Preset 1, typically, all lights etc. are fully on, in Preset 4, all of the lights are off. This is all customisable either by the programmer, or if it has been allowed, by the end user as well. So, sending 'Area 3 Preset 4' will turn off the lights in Area 3 (room 3). Sending 'Area 3 Preset 2' will set the lights to a low level, which is customisable. Channels can also be sent presets aside from the preset of the area to which they belong. 'Area 3 Preset 4' turns off the lights, then 'Area 3 Channel 7 Preset 1' will turn that light back on.

Each device contains its own programmable logic controller and follows the peer to peer model, the main advantage of this is that there is no reliance on a single central controller, the system is capable of a high level of resilience and therefore well suited to situations where total failure could be a safety issue, such as lighting systems in public places. The 'Message on Change' system only sends a message every time a lighting state is to change, as opposed to the DMX protocol, which is constantly streaming the entire data map. This allows for much more devices on a single bus, but also leads to missed messages as below. As most of the DyNet is openly published, it is possible to integrate with third party devices.

The DyNet protocol offers no error correction or transmission control, each network message is sent on a 'best effort' basis. This means that if a transmitted message is corrupted or missed by a receiving device, there is nothing to pick up that the message was not received, but also makes for much faster communication and response to user input in ideal situations. The design opens the possibility of devices missing messages. In the case of a user pushing a button to turn on a light, this does not present a large problem as the user will probably notice and press the button again, but if it is an automated message say, from a timeclock, there is potential for an important message turning on outside lights of a shopping center to be missed. The usual workaround for this is to simply send the important message twice or more. The previous Dynalite programming software (dLight 2) commonly in use up to 2011, (and still sometimes used for older equipment) was built progressively upon a Windows 3.11 application, and hides many undocumented keyboard shortcuts which are necessary to program a system. The Envision editor was launched in 2010 and is designed to be more intuitive and easy to use. It is designed for programmers it is not expected that end users will be able to set up their own systems, one needs training (usually free) provided by Dynalite distributors.