Adaptiv Simplifies Smart Lighting Commissioning with Silicon Labs
The Challenges of Commissioning Lighting Controls
For years, building owners, contractors, and lighting professionals have had few good options for commissioning lighting controls. Zoning, the process of configuring wireless switches, sensors, and fixtures so they control the correct lights in designated areas, is a slow and tedious process. It usually requires technicians to walk around with printed labels, log device IDs by hand, or scan QR codes to identify individual products. And after all of this is done, everything needs to be sorted manually using cloud applications or smartphone apps. This isn’t just time-consuming; it introduces frequent errors and delays projects.
Adaptiv, a smart lighting company with a focus on simplifying deployment at scale, set out to solve this problem for commercial and industrial environments. Their battery-free, neutral-optional Twitch wireless switch makes smart lighting easy to install and affordable, reducing complexity and cost barriers that have historically slowed adoption.
Manual Processes Undercut the Value and Slow Down the Adoption of Smart Lighting
Wireless controls promised flexibility, but the upfront labor to make them function correctly offset much of the value. Contractors often lacked wireless expertise and struggled with the manual steps. The devices themselves might be capable, but the configuration process is a bottleneck. As retrofits become more common and energy-efficiency regulations tighten, customers expect installations to move quickly so they can achieve the energy savings that come with LED upgrades and lighting controls. The industry understood that LED fixtures alone could cut energy use by at least half, and controls could cut that remaining load in half again. But the complexity of commissioning and the time required slowed adoption.
The Challenge
Commissioning wireless lighting controls in commercial buildings has traditionally been very slow, manual, and error-prone, often taking days and requiring specialized labor. Adaptiv set out to address this challenge by automating the process for installations of any size.
The Solution
Adaptiv created a fully automated commissioning solution using their Auto Commissioning technology with Silicon Labs’ Wireless Gecko MCUs that eliminates manual zoning and the need for specialized labor, gateways, cloud connections and apps.
The Result
Adaptiv’s TWITCH wireless wall switch, which is battery-free and neutral optional, can commission even large buildings in under an hour, delivering autonomous zoning at enterprise scale.
Adaptiv Brings Single-Button Startup to Lighting Commissioning at Any Scale
Adaptiv recognized that if commissioning could be automated, installation could be as straightforward as an LED retrofit. They accomplished this by developing their Auto Commissioning technology. Instead of manually collecting addresses from every device, Adaptiv leveraged the fact that wall switches in commercial buildings already control power to the fixtures on their respective switch legs. By deliberately cycling power, Adaptiv's TWITCH smart lighting switch instructs only the devices on that switch leg to add themselves to its zone. The sequence repeats from room to room until the entire bullding is commissioned.
The single-button startup of the TWITCH triggers the process across the entire structure. The same core commissioning method works for enterprise, building, and room-level configurations, and can scale to large commercial footprints with remarkable speed.
Fig 1: Adaptiv's Auto Commissioning uses the TWITCH wireless switch to automatically zone every device powered by its switch leg.
The Performance and Lower Power MG2x Helps Adaptiv Deliver No-Neutral Operation
Adaptiv uses Silicon Labs MG21 and MG22 multiprotocol devices, which combine high performance with very low power consumption. The processor handles the automated commissioning and continues running the wireless mesh network afterward from within the wall switch itself. Competing systems often require a gateway or hub to manage the network, and Adaptiv is in a category of its own because its switch offers enough processing capability and wireless functionality on its own.
The engineering team chose Silicon Labs because its devices met the project’s performance and low-power requirements. A lot of existing commercial buildings were wired without a neutral conductor running to the wall switch. This saved building costs by only sending the hot lead. But modern smart switches typically need both hot and neutral, which creates barriers for retrofits. Running a new neutral line requires opening walls and installing new wiring, which is expensive and disruptive. Adaptiv’s TWITCH comes pre-configured for installations without a neutral line, ideal for most commercial and industrial environments. It operates using a minimal amount of current between hot and ground and can handle all routing and mesh networking without a neutral line. While no-neutral devices have existed for years in limited applications such as occupancy sensors, Adaptiv is the first to support an entire wireless mesh lighting control system using this approach. This was made possible in part by Silicon Labs’ low-power design, which has been a hallmark of the Series 2 MCU family. Adaptiv also gained from Simplicity Studio’s unified development environment and from using pre-certified modules, which eliminated the need for a full FCC approval cycle.
Smart Lighting Commissioning Complete in Hours, Not Days
Commissioning has always been the hardest part of deploying smart lighting. With Adaptiv's Auto Commissioning, it's now more accessible. Customers now achieve days of work in under an hour with accuracy, repeatability, and scale that support the needs of modern enterprise projects.