Casambi has announced Evolution – a major firmware upgrade. Delivered over-the-air and free of charge, Evolution delivers enhanced performance with higher levels of security, and advanced feature capabilities that future-proof pre-installed Casambi Ready devices operating across existing networks.

Evolution can be applied to all luminaires, drivers and lighting control devices based on the Nordic Semiconductor nRF52 chip, across the Casambi ecosystem. For Casambi products, the firmware is available for the CBM-002, CBU-PWM4, CBU-ASR, CBU-DCS, CBU-TED (manufactured from 3 January 2019 onwards), CBU-ASD (1 June 2018 onwards), and the Xpress (13 March 2019 onwards).

When upgrading, all network settings are maintained. The optional Evolution firmware upgrade joins the company’s existing Classic firmware which continues to be supported.

“This latest Evolution firmware upgrade underlines why the Casambi ecosystem is the de facto Bluetooth lighting control standard,” said Timo Pakkala, co-founder of Casambi. “In addition to delivering advanced capabilities, Evolution demonstrates that Casambi is the leading end-to-end lighting control provider with the most seamless firmware upgrade path.”

Supporting up to eight Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) channels, Evolution offers better operational performance to users, taking advantage of four times more RAM chip memory to store new configuration data, such as additional scenes and timers. The new firmware also delivers an enhanced security model.

With this firmware upgrade, information on the condition and priority level of a Casambi device is now transferred through the Bluetooth mesh network, enabling detailed information to be visible remotely. This can be used to communicate that it has overheated, for example, or if there is a configuration failure or a missing driver.