Pulling a DALI bus through an occupied building is expensive. Pairing every fixture to a phone in 30 seconds is not. Casambi, Bluetooth SIG Mesh, Silvair, and Sylvania Wireless turned commissioning into an app, and a generation of retrofit projects that DALI could not economically reach.
Four ideas for picking wireless mesh vs wired DALI.
Each Casambi fixture both receives and re-broadcasts. Range extends with density, not centralised antennas. A 200-fixture office covers 5,000 m² without a single gateway.
Open the Casambi or Silvair app, scan the QR code on each driver, group fixtures by drag. What took 3 engineer-days on DALI takes 4 hours on Casambi for the same scope.
The phone is the gateway. For cloud / remote / scheduled scenes you add an inexpensive Casambi Gateway or BTL Network Manager. Local control survives any internet outage.
Concrete walls, RF interference, and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi congestion can fragment the mesh. Beyond ~250 nodes per network, plan multiple meshes with gateways.
Indicative values. Vendor implementations vary.
| Protocol | Topology | Max nodes | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casambi (proprietary BT) | Self-forming mesh | ~250 / network | Retrofit · commercial |
| Bluetooth SIG Mesh | Flooded mesh | ~32,000 | Large open-plan · NLC Trato |
| Silvair | SIG Mesh + cloud | ~5,000 / network | Energy-reporting tenants |
| Zigbee 3.0 | Mesh, 2.4 GHz | ~250 active | Smart-home integration |
| DALI-2 (wired) | Bus, daisy-chain | 64 / bus, multi-bus via router | New-build · audit-grade |
| 0-10 V (wired) | Analog | ~50 drivers / channel | Simple dimming |
Six engineering decisions behind every wireless lighting deployment.
A star topology (one central hub talking to every fixture) requires the hub to hear every node, hard through concrete walls. Mesh lets each node relay. As long as one neighbour can reach the destination, the message gets there.
Casambi was first to market with a proprietary BT-based mesh, easy commissioning but vendor lock-in. Bluetooth SIG Mesh is the open standard ratified in 2017, multi-vendor interoperable, used by Silvair, Sylvania, Cree, McWong. For a Saudi public-sector tender that wants supplier independence, SIG Mesh wins; for fastest commissioning on a private commercial fit-out, Casambi is hard to beat.
Many premium projects combine: DALI buses on each floor for audit-grade addressable control, and Bluetooth mesh as the management overlay that talks to each gateway. You get the spec compliance of DALI-2 and the commissioning speed of mesh.
Wired DALI sensors need a 16 V supply pulled to the ceiling. Casambi-compatible Xicato / EnOcean sensors run on a coin cell for 5+ years using energy-harvesting or sleep-cycle design. You drop them on a wall, scan, and they're commissioned.
Hospital theatres, FAA/SASO certification environments, and any space where lighting failure has safety implications still demand a wired bus. The mesh provides best-effort delivery; wired DALI provides deterministic, auditable response.
The same 2.4 GHz band runs Wi-Fi, BT keyboards, microwaves, and Zigbee. Casambi auto-channel-hops; SIG Mesh uses advertising channels. In a packed office tower, run a site survey, plan multiple subnets, and avoid one giant mesh that loses messages under load.
NLC fixtures support Casambi, Bluetooth SIG Mesh, DALI-2, KNX, and 0-10 V from the same product families, swap the driver, keep the housing.
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