DALI, which stands for Digital Addressable Lighting Interface, is a standard for lighting control. This standard fills the gap between traditional 1-10V systems and complex building management systems. A great advantage for this system is that it is completely digital.
Today, 0-10V systems are still the most popular standard for dimming of fluorescent lamps. DALI’s goal is to replace these systems. With DALI , it is easy to control the lamps individually, in groups or even the whole lamps in the building with a simple command. In a DALI system we have t\two types of devices: Master controller and Electrical Controlled Gear (ECG). An increasing number of lighting instruments manufacturers are producing DALI devices, among them are big names such as Osram, Philips and General Electric.
DALI Ballasts
DALI ballasts are electronic devices that receive DALI commands and set the lamps brightness accordingly. In addition to controlling the brightness, the ballasts can store up to 16 lighting scenes in their EPROM memory. In case an error happens they can report the error and set the brightness to a level also stored in the memory. You can see some examples of DALI commands below
Channel 32 @ 100% sets ballast no 32 at 100% luminance
Group 2 @30% sets ballasts in group 2 at 30% luminance
Scene 3 Go sets all the ballasts at luminance defined in scene 3
Using an interface, DALI systems can be integrated into BMS systems such as KNX.