from the article:
“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.
That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.
Yeah, like “Don’t hire idiots who believe what salespeople tell them.”
Because this is something that can be fixed for about $500 in cash to a decent electrician, who likely has the spare parts to cobble together a physical shutoff out in their van already.
I’ve never seen a technical solution that didn’t have a stupidly-accessible physical shutoff switch that could be used in the eventuality that the software failed.
Seriously, just turn the shit off at the breaker and be done with it. No “vendor” necessary.
My employer got a new office shortly after they were acquired by our current parent company. The office had lights that would dim or brighten based on the outside lighting conditions.
It’s also incredibly annoying, as a cloud would go by and the lights would fluctuate. We wanted it turned off. Apparently, that was simply not possible with the hardware installed. If the lights were turned on, they would auto-dim.
I could do it. Pull the roms on a controller, disassemble the software, reconstruct the protocols. Rig a Pi to send the protocols (overkill, I know). Piece of cake, compared to coin-op arcade game hardware.
And then I’d see if any other places needed fixes for their systems.
This was only installed a decade ago? 
Wait wait, their only solution is to replace the system? BS. You could hire a programmer for A YEAR for much less than that, and they would probably have it fixed in a few weeks.
Hell, let the students take a crack at it. I bet you there are a handful of kids already coding who could fix the system.
SMH
I’m sure that this problem has been solved before in other places.
If this is the same system, it sounds like everything routes through the central control, including the light switches.
If anything, this reinforces what an absolutely dumpster fire lighting control systems are. Closed- source, proprietary controllers that are held together with bubble gum, spit, and bondo, a controlling server that uses specific versions of software and will refuse to operate with anything else or if any part of the OS or system is upgraded or even patched to fix critical security holes*, and in order to program it, you have to use friggen Visio** because that’s what the programming application was constructed in.
( * which is why we put the entire lighting and building control systems into their own god damned isolated vlan at [RedactedCo]
( ** YES. VISIO. What the actual fuck.
There’s no point in spitballing solutions like everyone here is doing when you have almost no actual information about the problem. For instance, check out this system diagram on the manufacturer’s site and see if it matches your expectations:
There are so many things wrong with the whole system design and architecture if this is what happened. So in the end, they decide to go back to the same people who designed this ridiculous mess the first time, and ask them to build the replacement?? I don’t know who is stupider, the vendor or the buyer.
I bet it would cost less than $1.2m to put physical light switches in.
Initially I was expecting a much older system, because how the hell could they lose the software in 10 years?! (But, yeah, it happens.)
On the plus side, the point of failure is probably the 5th Light box at the center. The DALI segments are likely fine, and easy to test. Industrial Arduino DALI controllers would be a quick fix to let them turn off the lights.
Mmmmhmmmm; a friend of mine and her husband, early adopters of tech had smart systems installed, and found one night in the middle of winter that walking across the carpeted floor built up enough static electricity that when they touched a component of the system it blew the entire thing; lights, heat, everything. And then they had to find someone to fix the electronic system.
I like light switches, thank you very much.
One of my partners has three smart sockets that they can control through Alexa. The various effects are neat, I’ll grant. (“Alexa; turn on bisexual lighting …”) I will also note that they have physical light switches, so if Amazon doesn’t want them to turn off the lights we can just get up and flip a switch like some sort of animal.
I work in IT, so as cute as it is, I’m not going to put one of those things in my house.
I like my smart lights in my house, and run lights for a living. Seems like the big problem is the proprietary software and hardware controlling it all. I’m not sure why that can’t be replaced fairly easily. Sooner or later it’s just electrical wires.
But the lesson is to avoid proprietary, honestly. If I was in a venue and someone tried to sell me on an all- proprietary lighting rig and console, they’d be shown the door instantly.
If someone makes open-source control code that can be run on one of these tame IoS systems, they would be both lauded and make bank.
I’m wondering if by ‘software’ they mean the install-specific configuration; rather than the actual vendor layers that live underneath it on the server side and in device firmware, which probably could still be scrounged up.
I know that when we made the mistake of having one of Crestron’s Authorized Implementation Pals come in and overcomplicate a fairly simple situation they made a huge song and dance about generating (and then tweaking, as we empirically discovered all the fun bugs, race conditions; and undefined behaviors) the system configuration (to which we were not, and remain not, privy; the only copy is the one blown into the embedded black boxes…)
As far as I know the underlying Crestron stuff is nothing you couldn’t replace(well, you can’t, because you aren’t an Authorized Implementation Pal; but it’s either still on the market or available used); but the config is 100% gone if the not-particularly-redundancy-minded hardware loses its mind and the implementation pal has lost interest in your case.
I thought that some of the IT outfits were dicks about service contracts and lock in; but that was a whole different experience.
