Inside a tiny ASD Diamond British street light

This is one of the smallest proper street lights available. It's made by a British company called ASD and uses a conventional LED panel and a programmable driver.

After the video I was able to reprogram the driver to run the LEDs at just 10W. It's handy being able to read the driver settings of one light and then clone them to another. Ideal for where you are replacing a failed driver, since the faulty one will often still be readable due to its NFC circuitry being powered by your phone's coil.

The Tridonic app seems to work better than the others I've tried for different brands of driver. It still has some quirks, but was very usable.

The mode option was for extra sensor functionality to detect people or vehicles, and dim the light up and down as needed with duration and dimming speeds fully programmable.

The built in logging of run time and electrical anomalies is quite interesting. It has advantages for the manufacturer for detecting false warranty claims where the light has been exposed to unusually high voltage due to miswiring or a lost neutral.

If you work on one of these lights, be aware that the latching system is not released from the top as it may initially appear. It is released from the underside at the pole entrance point. Don't jam a screwdriver under the top and try to lever it open with force.

Note that the wires on the LED panel are a one-way trip. They cannot be removed without cutting them. Trying to release them may actually damage the panel. In normal use the panel would only be changed if it had failed anyway.

I mostly managed to avoid having a rant about the deskilling of labour in the street lighting and traffic signal industry. There's a bizarre UK culture of falsifying electrical skills using one-day slideshow "training" in one of the worst electrical working environments possible - wet and well grounded.

One day I'll probably take a deeper dive into one of the electronic drivers. But they are massively complicated, with microcontrollers and network functionality.

The choice of LEDs is interesting. Quite well engineered and tested under real-life conditions during manufacture.


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