Cooper Lighting · Signify · Enterprise IoT

Commissioning, at hospital scale

An industry-first commissioning experience for DALI-2 Lighting System, a protocol-constrained commercial IoT product taken from zero to shipped across hardware, firmware, and field reality at once. First deployment: the largest DALI-2 install in North America.

Read the full case study See the commissioning flow

wavelinx.app · operate · floor 1, east

WaveLinx Operate floor plan, rooms color-coded by lighting state

WaveLinx Operate, floor-wide health status with rooms color-coded by state, clustered to scale from 50 to 3,000 devices

The Brief

The core problem was time

Cooper Lighting was retiring two legacy platforms, Fifth Light and iLight. WaveLinx DALI was the DALI-2-certified replacement, and there was no product to iterate on. The DALI-2 protocol's timing rules are physical, they cannot be engineered away.

In V1, adding a hub locked the entire UI behind a blocking loader, "Processing… Adding DALI Hub and Devices to WAC," that grew to 27.5 minutes per hub to absorb 250 devices. Multiply across ten hubs per controller, and contractors sat idle for hours. The fix was never a longer timeout, it was designing around the wait.

Role

Lead Product Designer · UX owner end to end

Scope

Research → DeliveryFlow architecture · UI · Icons

Team

15 cross-functionalEng · Product · Firmware · Dev

Platform

Mobile · Web

Client

Cooper Lighting · Signify

First deployment

Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital

Challenge

A protocol that couldn't change

Three constraints shaped every screen. None could be removed, the UX had to absorb each one rather than wish it away.

A blocking import, by design

Discovery triggered a full scan of all four buses. No navigation, no area creation, no parallel work, no progress, until it finished.

Built for 30–50 devices

Every screen, device trees, area lists, the Operate floor plan, assumed a handful of wireless devices. DALI-2 brought thousands per floor.

Make-or-break, not polish

Channel partners and facilities teams were judging whether WaveLinx DALI could credibly replace their tools. A blocking experience at hospital scale was not acceptable.

The Scale

The numbers I was designing for

DALI-2's physical limits define the whole problem space. Every interaction had to hold from a single bus to a full hospital floor.

10,000+

Devices per
hospital floor

Buses
per floor

DALI hubs
per panel

128

Fixtures
per bus

1,000 ft

Max bus
length

250

Devices per hub
(per scan)

Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital, architectural rendering, the first DALI-2 deployment

First deployment · Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital, the largest DALI-2 installation in North America.

Approach

From "wait for it" to work through it

We stopped designing for when the scan finishes, and started designing for what users can do while it's still running. The non-blocking V2 architecture turned a protocol-imposed wait into invisible background work, contractors configure areas while device import runs in parallel.

Non-blocking import

ADD TO WAC pairs the hub and runs the bus scan in the background. The UI never blocks, with a two-banner progress model that stays visible the whole way.

Hub-first discovery

Discover only DALI hubs by name, MAC, and IP, no IP hunting or DIP switches. A persistent "remaining devices in WAC" counter keeps installation-wide context in view.

Filter before load

Instead of "show everything," the technician picks System → Hub → Bus first, scoping the list to a single bus's 128 devices before anything renders, exactly how DALI-2 is wired.

A visual language for the bus

A custom icon set embeds the DALI 2-wire bus as a shared motif, so users read "this is a DALI device" as a category, then the type at a glance.

The Commissioning Flow

Discovery, not data entry

Hub-first import takes a raw hub from the network to a named, addressable system, with a persistent device counter the whole way. The real screens, shipped to the field.

Discovered DALI hubs, each found automatically by name, MAC and IP

Step 1 · Discover, every hub on the network

Inline editing of DALI hub and bus names tied to floor and location

Step 2 · Name, hub and buses inline

Successfully added to WAC, confirmation with remaining device count

Step 3 · Added to WAC, with remaining count

The Pivot · V1 → V2

One modal, the whole app behind it

The actual V1 screen sat on top of a frozen interface for 10 to 27.5 minutes per hub. V2 deleted this blocking state entirely.

v1 · processing… adding dali hub and devices to wac

Real V1 blocking modal, Processing Adding DALI Hub and Devices to WAC, over a frozen interface

The reframe, in one line

"We stopped designing for when the scan finishes, and started designing for what users can do while it's still running."

Non-blocking: keep working during import

Two-banner progress model, always visible

Hub-first model matches MQTT pairing

Lifecycle

The full lifecycle, after launch

Commissioning is only the beginning. Hospitals expand, floors get reconfigured, devices get added to existing buses. Manage Hub supports the whole lifecycle, monitor health, rescan, and take corrective action without disrupting a live facility.

Manage Hub, bus inventory broken down by category with live counts

Find Devices, a guarded confirmation dialog before rescanning a live hub

Add Devices, new and existing devices kept separate before any change is committed

Manage Hub · Drivers 64, Wall Stations 23, Sensors 13, CCIs 2 per bus Find Devices · a confirm dialog guards a live hub before any rescan Add Devices · new vs existing, with a 5–8 min processing estimate

The Operate Floor Plan

Scales 50 → 3,000, no model change

I replaced the fixed device tree with a Building → Floor → Area → Zone → Device dropdown bar and clustered the map. Zoom in to break clusters into devices; toggle by type or health. The same map renders on every surface.

Filter-before-load device list scoped to a single bus's 128 devices

Clustered floor plan showing device counts per area, readable at floor zoom

Device-level floor plan with individual devices color-coded by type

Filter before load · clustered at floor zoom · individual devices on zoom-in

Craft · A Visual Language

The two-wire bus, in every icon

I custom-designed the device icon set in Adobe Illustrator, embedding the DALI 2-wire bus, the defining physical trait of every DALI device, as a shared motif. Exported as SVG, validated for rendering via Fontello.

DALI Hub

DALI Hub Bus

Fixture · Dimmable

Light Fixture · DT8

Light Fixture · CCT

DT6 · Single

DT6 · Dual

Dual-Tech Sensor

PIR Sensor

Wall Station

Contact Closure

Relay · On/Off

RSP DAC · CCT

RSP DAC · Dimmable

Find Devices

Press-ready DALI-2 Lighting System hub hardware label, die-cut and spec-complete with test-mode instructions

Press-ready WDH-D2-LV hub label, die-cut and spec-complete with test-mode instructions, created in Illustrator and shipped on the hardware.

Outcome

Zero to one, shipped and QA-clean

A net-new product category delivered across mobile and web, validated against 200+ device types on four buses, and clean through the full QA regression suite, ready for the largest DALI-2 deployment in North America.

Hub-first, non-blocking commissioning across the mobile app

Custom DALI-2 icon system with a shared two-wire motif

DT8 dual-channel (CCT / white-tunable) driver support with auto-addressing

Filter-before-load area commissioning, scoped to a single 128-device bus

Identify at hub, bus, and device level for physical-to-logical verification

Mixed-protocol zones: DALI, CAT wired, and WaveLinx wireless together

By the Numbers