0-10 V lighting control

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0-10V is one of the earliest and simplest electronic lighting control signalling systems; simply put, the control signal is a DC voltage that varies between zero and ten volts. The controlled lighting should scale its output so that at 10V, the controlled light should be at 100% of its potential output, and at 0V it should at 0% output (i.e. “Off”). Dimming devices may be designed to respond in various patterns to the intermediate voltages, giving output curves that are linear for: voltage output, actual light output, power output, or perceived light output.

There are two possible, and incompatible, variations to the 0 to 10V system: 0 to -10V and 0 to +10V. Both systems were widely implemented by lighting manufacturers.

In production lighting this system was replaced by analog multiplexed systems such as D54 and AMX192, which themselves have been almost completely replaced by DMX512. For dimmable Fluorescent lamps (where it operates instead at 1-10v, where 1v is minimum and 0v is off) the system is being replaced by DSI, which itself is in the process of being replaced by DALI.

[edit] Advantages

Its simple nature makes it straight forward to understand, implement and diagnose while its low current (typically 1mA) means it can be run along relatively thin cables with little voltage drop.

[edit] Disadvantages

It requires one wire per control channel (plus a common return wire). A sophisticated system could have hundreds of wires, requiring expensive multicore cables and connectors.

Over a long cable, the voltage drop requires every channel of the receiving device to be calibrated to compensate for the voltage losses. However this is only a theoretical limitation as the resistance of the thinnest practical wire is around 20Ω / 1000m