In March 2021, the first lighting cabinet with a Smart Light Controller went live on the platform. It was not a pilot. It was a real installation, with a real budget and real public accountability.
The Smart Light Controller is a public lighting management system built on open source technology: one Industrial Shields controller in each lighting cabinet for switching and data acquisition, and a web and mobile platform for remote control, energy consumption tracking, fault detection and maintenance management.
What the Smart Light Controller does
It gives municipalities control over their lighting cabinets: remote on and off switching, dimming where the installation allows it, monitoring of consumption, voltage and current on the three phases, and automatic alarms when a lamp group fails, a cabinet door opens or a cable is cut.
There is one Smart Light Controller in each lighting cabinet, and each controller has its own SIM. It talks straight to the platform over the mobile network. There are no concentrators and no network to build between cabinets. Where the installation allows it, the controller dims the luminaires over U6Me2 (Tridonic) or CodedMains (Philips).
Key capabilities in deployment:
- Remote on and off of one circuit or the whole cabinet
- Astronomical schedule based on the sunrise and sunset of each town, with an offset in minutes
- Dimming profiles and a midnight point, where the installation allows it
- Voltage, current, active power and power factor per phase, measured in each cabinet
- Alarm on a sudden change in consumption, such as a failed lamp group or a tripped protection
- Open cabinet door and cable theft alarms
- Real consumption measured per cabinet, the base to calculate the savings of each installation
From Arduino PLC to ESP32 PLC: an upgrade within the same ecosystem
The Smart Light Controller was first built on Industrial Shields Arduino PLCs: the M-Duino family, programmed with the Arduino IDE. That base proved itself in the field: reliable, easy to maintain and open to changes without vendor dependency.
When Industrial Shields launched the ESP32 PLC family, the decision to upgrade the SLC platform was simple. The dual core ESP32 changes the equation for a connected field controller: one core handles the I/O and the lighting logic, the other handles communications (Modbus and the mobile data link), and neither function competes for processing time.
For a system with hundreds of cabinets in many towns, that separation matters. A slow mobile link does not affect control response. Control logic does not stall waiting for network operations.
Both generations remain in active service. Installations built on M-Duino PLCs continue to run without interruption. New deployments use the ESP32 PLC. The programming environment, the Arduino IDE, is the same in both cases. The skills transfer completely.
Why public administration chose the Smart Light Controller
Public administrations do not make procurement decisions lightly. Lighting infrastructure runs for decades. The hardware and software managing it needs to remain operational, auditable, and maintainable across budget cycles, staff changes, and technology updates.
Built on open source foundations, the Smart Light Controller runs on Industrial Shields hardware made for continuous operation in industrial environments: CE marked, designed to handle grid noise, temperature variation and the electrical conditions of real public infrastructure. The programming environment is stable, well documented and open to engineering teams without proprietary licences or vendor training.
For public sector procurement, that combination of proven field performance, industrial-grade hardware, and a maintainable software stack is a concrete answer to a real concern.
More than 1,000 cabinets since 2021, and still growing
The scale matters not as a marketing number but as evidence. More than 1,000 lighting cabinets have been connected to the platform since March 2021, and around 780 are active today. Each one is a Smart Light Controller with its own SIM. Together they have been tested against real conditions: grid noise, temperature variation, mobile network interruptions, hardware failures and software updates on deployed units.
It has not stopped growing since 2021. New city councils and provincial governments continue to adopt the Smart Light Controller. The platform that started with one cabinet now spans several provinces. The platform measures the real consumption of each cabinet, and that measurement is the base to calculate the savings of each installation.
Technical foundation
The Smart Light Controller is built on Industrial Shields hardware and programmed with the Arduino IDE. Each controller has a GPRS/GSM modem and its own SIM, and reaches the platform directly over the mobile network, with no concentrators. A network analyzer in the cabinet measures voltage, current, active power and power factor on the three phases, and the controller reads it over Modbus RS-485. Where the installation allows it, the luminaires are dimmed over U6Me2 (Tridonic) or CodedMains (Philips).
The full kit (SLC19R) includes the SIM activation with a VPN and the first year of data, 15 MB per month. From the second year, the SIM and the platform maintenance are renewed every year.
The ESP32 PLC version adds Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE, and the dual core architecture lets control logic and communications run independently.
→ Read the case study: one Smart Light Controller in each lighting cabinet