Construire un IoT durable avec Zigbee et Green Power Success Story Legrand
Legrand, headquartered in Limoges, France, is a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructure and offers high-value-added products and solutions that improve lives by transforming the spaces where people live, work, and meet. Operating worldwide, Legrand works to enhance electrical and digital building infrastructure, embracing the shift to digital technologies while contributing to reduced carbon footprints.
Since its foundation, Legrand has adapted itself to market evolutions over the past century with the creation of its first light switch in 1919 to its first Zigbee enabled device in 2007. After a century of innovation, Legrand continues to look to the future with its IoT offerings.
Today, Legrand’s comprehensive IoT offerings provide simple, innovative, and sustainable solutions for commercial, industrial, and residential markets to customers worldwide, including residential and nonresidential buildings, data centers, industrial spaces and infrastructure.
Legrand is committed to bring IoT products into homes and buildings to create a smarter and greener connected world.
To meet this goal, Legrand selected Zigbee due to its reliable and robust mesh network, affordability and efficient power consumption.
Wirelessly Connected – Zigbee and Green Power Applications
Legrand is integrating Zigbee technology in the product solutions since 2007 and launched its first complete Zigbee device range in 2009. Following that, in 2012 Legrand became a Board member of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly the Zigbee Alliance, to help to drive the development and to promote the interoperable Zigbee standard. In addition to joining the Board, Legrand was also a critical driver behind the unification of Zigbee profiles into what is now Zigbee 3.0.
Today Legrand carries 90+ certified Zigbee products and 20+ certified Green Power devices, under the umbrella of the ELIOT program. These devices are currently deployed worldwide in more than 60 countries. To continue expanding global reach, in 2018 Legrand acquired Netatmo (French tech company specialized in IoT solutions) to launch its “With Netatmo” product offers. Currently, over a million active devices are deployed worldwide through the ELIOT program. In 2021 the program also expanded into North America and is expected to expand into 100 countries by 2023.
Sustainability has always been at the core of Legrand’s IoT offerings. For decades Legrand has been investigating and investing in battery-less solutions. Legrand decided to utilize Green Power by CSA as its low energy solution because it is durable, compatible with existing networks and reliable.
Today Legrand’s ELIOT program product profile embeds the Green Power Proxy & Sink feature of Zigbee to meet its sustainability goals. Legrand’s Green Power certified devices work without a battery and allow for large scale wireless installations.
Green Power is integrated into a variety of Legrand’s smart home features including switches and power outlets. These devices have more than 20 different functions (switch, dimmer, shutter control, ventilation, and many others) and integrate seamlessly and aesthetically into customers’ smart spaces.
Benefits of Green Power
Green Power is a specialty of Zigbee solution that allows for energy-harvesting technology to be used directly with the Zigbee stack. Green Power has become the global wireless standard for large installations where changing batteries and accessing devices would be inconvenient if not cost-prohibitive. Green Power technology delivers a host of benefits to builders, installers, customers and consumers:
Energy-harvesting Capabilities: Harvesting energy from local sources like heat, kinetic or light allows the sensors and actuators for automation systems to go where they are needed without wires, batteries, or costly installation.
Low Power/Low Energy Consumption: Ultra-low power RF silicon uses many orders of magnitude less power than required for a sleepy or fully networked wireless connection; and the mesh network saves even more energy by reducing packet length, round-trips, connection rediscovery, and on-network time for devices that may be offline for extended periods of time.
Reduced Costs: Green Power is a technology optimized to significantly lengthen the life of your batteries and reduce maintenance costs with minimal need to replace batteries or rewire buildings.
Support for Battery-less Solutions: Enable use cases where battery replacement is not an option for devices in locations where the battery cannot be replaced. Reliable and Robust Networking: A Zigbee network, including Green Power devices, is selforganizing and self-healing and quickly adapts to changes in network topology – effectively avoiding a single point of failure.
Standardized Interoperability: A standard application layer to control the sensors that support compressed messages and limited transactions and creating more interoperable solutions.
The Newest Green Power Devices from Legrand
Legrand’s newest wireless and batteryless wall switches use Green Power to both lower cost for customers and lower environmental impact. Today, Legrand is proud to contribute to the IoT market by taking care of our planet thanks to its new batteryless wall switches. This new product is slim, very robust and delivers extended range. These switches can be utilized in many smart spaces.
- For Office areas, wireless & batteryless controls provide positioning of choice (on the wall, on a desk, on a glass partition, etc.) and a maintenance free system.
- In Smart Homes, these controls also allow for a 2/3 way switch without new wires, in a choice location, with ease of set-up, and aesthetics void of wired devices.
Legrand continues to expand its connected products and unveil new Green Power-enabled products for smart spaces. As the connected world becomes more relevant in our everyday lives, watch for Legrand’s newest Green Power products to expand your smart space in a sustainable and functional way.
(view of the energy harvesting-technology embedded in the wireless, batteryless switch)
ELIOT, LEGRAND’S CONNECTED DEVICES PROGRAM
Eliot is the connected devices program launched in 2015 by Legrand to speed up deployment of its Internet of Things offering. Thanks to Eliot, millions of Legrand users, both private individuals and professionals, are now experiencing connected life every day. Switching the light on or off by voice control has become standard. Remotely controlling the emergency lighting in buildings is becoming the norm. So, backed up by Eliot, new connected solutions are created daily. In parallel, with dynamic interoperability, new services and features are imagined every day. Eliot is now deployed all over the world and creates a lasting improvement in the experience of Legrand users.