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Environmental monitoring on the streetlight network.
A city’s streetlights are already powered, already connected and already spaced evenly across every street it owns. That makes the lighting network the cheapest sensing grid a municipality will ever build, provided the controllers and the platform were designed to carry more than light.
Can streetlights be used for environmental monitoring?
Yes. A smart streetlight controller can carry sensors on its own connector and pass their readings over the same wireless mesh that controls the light, so air quality, noise or water-level data reaches the city on infrastructure it has already paid to power and connect.
The Dimonoff RME exposes sensor inputs and outputs on pins 6 and 7 of its ANSI C136.41 socket, and also takes a Zhaga Book 18 port with D4i. Readings travel over the Wi-SUN FAN or DigiMesh network that already carries lighting traffic and arrive in Dimonoff | SCMS, which connects an unlimited number of sensors and devices independent of network or device manufacturer, up to 1,000,000 nodes or sensors per system.
Environmental monitoring on the streetlight network.
Why the lighting network rather than a new one
Every sensing project meets the same costs before it measures anything: power at the sensor, a route back to a server, and somewhere for the data to land. A streetlight network has already paid all of them.
- Power: the pole is energised every night and, with a controller in place, addressable during the day as well.
- Position: streetlights sit on a regular grid across the whole municipality. That is exactly the coverage an environmental map needs, and the hardest thing to retrofit.
- Backhaul: the mesh is self-forming and self-healing and already carries lighting traffic. One more sensor reading is marginal.
- Somewhere to land: the same map that shows a failed lamp can show a reading, without a second platform and a second login.
What can be measured
These are the sensing applications Dimonoff | SCMS carries in production alongside lighting. The platform is the common layer; the instruments themselves come from specialist manufacturers.
- Air quality and gas detection.
- Acoustic event detection: collision, gunshot, explosion.
- Water level in sewers and rivers.
- Waste collection levels.
- Parking space availability.
What Dimonoff supplies, and what it does not
Being explicit about this saves a procurement cycle. Dimonoff supplies the controller with its sensor ports, the wireless network, the gateway, and the platform that displays and distributes the readings. It does not manufacture the environmental instruments themselves.
That is a design decision rather than a gap. The platform connects sensors independent of manufacturer, so a city chooses the air quality instrument its environment department already trusts, and the lighting network carries it.
Getting the readings to where they are used
Environmental data is worth little inside a lighting tool. It reaches the systems that act on it through the same integrations the lighting data uses: ArcGIS/Esri for the city’s GIS, Power BI and Grafana for reporting, Microsoft Azure, and a bidirectional REST API for anything not on that list. Hosting is certified cloud with data residency in Canada, or on-premise.
Questions about sensors on streetlights
How does a sensor connect to a streetlight controller?
On the RME, through sensor inputs and outputs on pins 6 and 7 of the ANSI C136.41 seven-pin socket, or through a Zhaga Book 18 port with D4i. Any node carrying a sensor can also act as master for several others.
Does adding sensors require a second network?
No. Readings travel over the same Wi-SUN FAN or DigiMesh mesh that carries lighting control. The platform can additionally bring third-party NB-IoT or LoRaWAN devices onto the same system, for a site that already has them.
How many sensors can one system carry?
Up to 1,000,000 nodes or sensors per system, in real time. One G4 gateway manages up to 1,000 wireless nodes, so coverage grows by adding gateways rather than by replacing the platform.
Does Dimonoff sell the air quality sensors?
No. Dimonoff supplies the controllers, the network, the gateways and the platform. The environmental instruments come from specialist manufacturers, and the platform connects them independent of the manufacturer.
Tell us what you need to measure.
We will tell you what the lighting network can carry, and what a three-month pilot on 100 to 500 luminaires would prove.