Digital Serial Interface (DSI) is a
protocol
Protocol may refer to:
Sociology and politics
* Protocol (politics)
Protocol originally (in Late Middle English, c. 15th century) meant the minutes or logbook taken at a meeting, upon which an agreement was based. The term now commonly refers to ...
for the controlling of lighting in buildings (initially
electrical ballast
An electrical ballast is a device placed in series with a load to limit the amount of electric current, current in an electrical network, electrical circuit.
A familiar and widely used example is the inductive ballast used in fluorescent lamp ...
s). It was created in 1991 by
Austria
Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...
n company
Tridonic and is based on
Manchester-coded 8-bit protocol,
data rate Data rate and data transfer rate can refer to several related and overlapping concepts in communications networks:
Achieved rate
* Bit rate, the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time
** Data signaling rate or gross bit rate ...
of 1200
baud
In telecommunications and electronics, baud (; symbol: Bd) is a common unit of measurement of symbol rate, which is one of the components that determine the speed of communication over a data channel.
It is the unit for symbol rate or modulat ...
, 1 start
bit
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as ...
, 8 data bits (dimming value), 4 stop bits, and is the basis of the more sophisticated protocol
Digital Addressable Lighting Interface
Digital Addressable Lighting Interface (DALI) is a trademark for network-based products that control lighting. The underlying technology was established by a consortium of lighting equipment manufacturers as a successor for 1-10 V/ lighting ...
(DALI).
The technology uses a single byte to communicate the lighting level (0-255 or 0x00-0xFF). DSI was the first use of digital communication in lighting control, and was the precursor to
DALI
Dali or DALI may refer to:
Art and popular culture
* Dali, a location in ''Final Fantasy IX''
* ''Dali'' (Dalida album) (1984)
* ''Dali'' (Ali Project album) (1994)
* Espace Dalí, Salvador Dalí's permanent exhibition in France
Religion
...
.
Advantages
* Its simple nature makes it straightforward to understand,
implement, and diagnose, while its low voltage means it typically runs along relatively thin cables.
* Because each device has its own wire to the
controller (rather than being part of a
network
Network, networking and networked may refer to:
Science and technology
* Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects
* Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks
Mathematics
...
) it has no need of an address to be set, so can be replaced simply by unplugging the faulty one and plugging in the new.
* It dims to off, so does not require mains switching equipment to turn them off.
Disadvantages
* It requires one wire per control channel so a sophisticated system could have hundreds of wires, thereby making diagnoses of problems difficult.
* It is a