The Right Scenes and Control
Meeneghan has tried different approaches to automating lighting on yachts. “It’s never a one-size-fits-all scenario,” he notes. He recalls one client who had warmed to the idea of sensors that picked up exterior light levels and mimicked those conditions indoors. “That worked fine until she wanted to read inside a stateroom on a cloudy day,” he says. His experience has led him to create four basic lighting scenes that he can program into a yacht’s lighting control, and owner, guests, and crew can call those up manually. “You always have to build that flexibility into the system, even those with the most advanced automated functions — life changes, right?” This is a big benefit of Crestron control solutions for Meeneghan: “It’s very easy and intuitive to call up a desired scene.”
With more yachts traveling north, Meeneghan notes that the need for artificial circadian light becomes pronounced. “In the tropics, in the Mediterranean, and so on, the transition between night and day is pretty ‘clean’ — sunlight, twilight, darkness. When you’re ailing around, say, Scotland, that transition becomes much less pronounced given the weather we’ve got,” he says. “The ability of a platform like Crestron Home OS to manage circadian rhythms is fantastic for just this purpose: We set those values based on the client’s desires and the needs of the crew, and then we’re all set.”
As Meeneghan notes above, DALI® standard is a great way to control tunable white LED lights. And the good news is that Crestron is going to launch a new DALI gateway this summer: the Crestron DIN-DLI, a next-generation DALI lighting controller designed to simplify complexity for integrators and bring the beauty of dynamic lighting right to a user’s fingertips. The DIN-DLI makes integration even smoother, and the gateway is smaller than the current options, saving space in lighting cabinets.