Ingy strengthens ties with wireless mesh company Wirepas (UPDATED)

Dutch smart-lighting networking startup Ingy continues to fortify its offerings, solidifying ties with wireless mesh specialist Wirepas, while also adding EnOcean sensors into the Ingy habitat.

Amsterdam based Ingy was founded less than two years ago, and in that time it has developed a preference for the Wirepas protocol, which it has deployed at University Medical Center Utrecht and Zone College in Doetinchem, Holland.

Ingy relies on Tampere, Finland-based Wirepas to support the many applications including controls, occupancy sensing, data gathering, and others that Ingy offers across its network. The Wirepas mesh allows those application to operate across swaths of floors and office space. Together, the two companies have aimed to support not just lighting but other smart building functions. For example, occupancy data, when analyzed, can help facilities managers decide how to repurpose space.

Now Ingy and Wirepas have taken their partnership to the next level as Ingy facilitates the integration of the technology with lighting manufacturers, data portal operators, software and controls companies, sensor providers, and other types of vendors.

“We now became far more strategic about our cooperation,” Ingy CEO Bastiaan de Groot told LEDs Magazine. “Our solution helps lighting companies looking to build a Wirepas-based lighting controls system to significantly reduce their time to market, which is in both our companies' strategic interest. We have taken Wirepas and build an entire lighting stack and ecosystem of hardware providers around it.”

De Groot has chosen Wirepas over other wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and Zigbee because he rates its ability to scale up into the thousands of luminaires.

Ingy has already helped integrate Koopman Interlight luminaires into Wirepas networks running Ingy software, and is expected to announce other luminaire partners soon.

The startup, which opened for business in May 2018, also announced that it now supports a new “multisensor” from EnOcean. The solar-powered chip uses energy harvesting to make it battery free. It is an all-in-one detector of humidity, lighting, and acceleration.

While the sensor can reside in luminaires, it can also be mounted on walls and ceilings. Smart lighting companies like Ingy increasingly are doubling as information technology specialists, using the lighting infrastructure when it suits, but also going outside the luminaire. It’s part of the lighting industry’s push into the Internet of Things (IoT) market.

EnOcean is based in Oberhaching, Germany. The EnOcean Alliance was founded in 2008 to promote and support technologies developed to the ISO/IEC wireless standard (14543-3-10), which use very low levels of energy and also allow energy harvesting for the aforementioned battery-free operation.

Other Ingy partners include controls provider Danlers, data portal provider Gooee, and systems integrator Fujitsu, among others.

MARK HALPER is a contributing editor for LEDs Magazine, and an energy, technology, and business journalist ([email protected]).

*Updated Mar. 4, 2020 9:02 AM for additional detail.