A Behind-the-Scenes Look at SATCO’s Domino Networked Lighting Controls System
Building on the wildly popular Starfish platform, a smart home control system for the residential market that began with color-changing lamps and has since grown in scope to include downlights, security lighting, video doorbells, cameras, and touchscreens, SATCO has released a comprehensive system for the commercial lighting controls market under the name Domino.
The development of the Domino Networked Lighting Controls program is the responsibility of industry veteran Rick Hurst, who was hired by SATCO in 2023 as director of Business Development/Connected Lighting and recently promoted to Vice President of that division.
“I come from an engineering and sales and marketing background,” Hurst explains. “In the early 2000s, I was with Crestron and created their commercial lighting controls platform. After that, I worked in specification sales in New York and built a controls division for the Cooper Lighting agent for about eight or nine years before working with other agencies in New York. I realized that wireless was the way that this industry was going to trend because of the significant labor savings and design flexibility of wireless control solutions.”
Some of the challenges of traditional wired systems are that every system wires differently, which can also be confusing. Wiring errors can be very difficult to change,” Hurst explains. “It was also a bit restrictive, limiting what can be done in terms of changes in a spaceand in terms of future proofing the capabilitiesof the system.”
At SATCO, according to Hurst, “We were able to take advantage of the latest technology, which has evolved and now is quite robust. For Domino, we’re using Bluetooth Mesh, which gives us a significant advantage over many top competitors, who might still be tied to legacy technology. Many are still using hub-based wireless controls. With Bluetooth Mesh, we’re building sensors into our fixtures, so that the fixtures become intelligent. Every Domino fixture has a sensor on board that receives the signal in, transmits the signal out,and indelibly stores the programmed information in the on-board control. Because all of the fixtures communicate with each other on the mesh network, that signal becomes very robust, and you eliminate the need for these expensive hubs.”
There are other benefits to utilizing Bluetooth Mesh. “It’s simpler, it’s less expensive, it’s more powerful, and it’s secure,” Hurst affirms. “Since Bluetooth Mesh does not rely on a building’s Wi-Fi, its operating system works independently in a space. Bluetooth Mesh has its own 2.4 gigahertz network that is completely separate.”
The decision to enter the commercial lighting controls market was not one that SATCO took lightly. “Customers have asked for a number of years for SATCO to get in the market,” Hurst comments. “When I joined SATCO two years ago, they had already gotten started with developing a system. I was fortunate to be able to work with them to find the right partners and the right solution set to deliver as powerful of a system as Domino.”
Over the course of about 18 months, the SATCO team built and tested products to get the fixtures exactly right. Since its official launch several months ago, Domino has already been implemented in dozens of installations including a 300,000-sq.-ft. warehouse in Arizona, a restaurant in Northern California, and law offices in Maryland to a fruit distribution warehouse in Washington State, a college in Chicago, and a distributor showroom on the West Coast, with hundreds of new projects in progress.
Some key differences
According to Hurst, SATCO’s core strengths of providing superior customer service and support was an especially great fit for this category. “Being easy to work with and customer-friendly are critical elements of the controls business. With Domino specifically, we took what was an existing platform and modified it to do a few things differently that I thought would be meaningful to our customers,” he notes. “Most of our competitors make what we I would call sensor-ready fixtures, designed to accept whatever controls you want to put in them. They are basically waiting for a sensor to either be built or shipped installed.”
Instead of that more common method, Domino fixtures are one SKU with the sensor built in, completely wired, and in stock. “This not only simplifies the ordering process, but it’s faster to market. That is one of the core advantages, but there are many others,” Hurst recounts. “We’ve added capabilities such as phase dimming — so we can control any other company’s lighting fixtures as well as ours, which is critically important on controls projects because not all lighting on every project is [the same].”
Other advantages include unique power control requirements that can help reduce labor and components as well components that are simpler in design. “I think the most significant advantage we have over our competitors is the most important part of controls: a world-class support team. We can compete with anyone and can do things on many projects that many of our competitors can’t,” Hurst states.
Reliable Future-Proofing
According to Hurst, the Domino system can be as simple as a basic wired network that ties back to a server that can be remotely accessed. “You can get over-the-air updates to the product if need be, plus you can layer third-party analytics, or use our partners’ software analytics to enhance the value of the whole system platform by seeing how often the spaces are occupied or – in a retail store – offering heat mapping that shows where people congregate the most to display your most valuable merchandise,” he says. “You can do things like wayfinding because the sensors are throughout all of the fixtures. It can find you in a space and show you how to get to where you want to go by using the app. One of the most unique applications is allowing a medical facility to do things like critical asset tracking to find an important piece of life-saving equipment in real time. If that equipment is tagged with an RFID device, you can find it in real time through the lighting control system,” he adds.
Hurst notes that the aforementioned examples are custom-design solutions that can be tailored to any project based on wants and needs. “We have the flexibility and scalability to design very simple energy code-compliant lighting solutions or we can go beyond that with some of these unique features,” he explains. “One feature that customers like is that most standard Satco fixtures have a little dip switch that enables the user to change the color temperature from 2700 to 3000K, 4000K, or 5000K. However, once that fixture has been installed in the ceiling, it isn’t as easy to change. We have built that ability into our app for all of our interior fixtures – flat panels, troffers, strips, and downlights – so that the user can color-tune them through the app and even do so automatically throughout the day to emulate circadian rhythm control.”
Hurst continues, “We’re not the first to do this, but previously that has been a very expensive add because you had to have special tunable drivers for the fixtures and you had to have an extra point of control to execute that. Now we’ve just built it in, so that’s another feature that sets us apart.”
Future Plans
Offices spaces with conference rooms, classrooms, warehouses, parking garages, restaurants, and even assisted living complexes are good candidates for the Domino system. “Assisted living is a huge market for us because the tunable light feature is a big deal [for circadian rhythm] and mental health facilities is another area. There are a ton of applications that we’re working on. We literally have hundreds of projects in development since launching Domino over the past few months,” Hurst says.
Industry professionals can see the Domino line for themselves at trade shows such as Lightovation in January at the Dallas Market Center and at LEDucation at the New York Hilton Midtown in April.
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