Until recently, the brightness of electric lights was only controlled by electromechanical means. Specifically, a potentiometer, rheostat, or a special three-position luminaire was used to reduce the power consumption of the light bulb. However, these technologies were designed for, and only worked well with, traditional incandescent bulbs.
Recent developments in lighting technology produced many new lighting products incorporating solid-state technology within the bulb. Compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs used miniaturized switching power supplies and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are themselves solid-state electronic devices. Early CFL and LED bulbs were not designed to accommodate the variable voltage supplied by conventional dimmers, and did not work well. Newer CFL and LED bulbs are designed to accommodated conventional dimmers, but the user must still walk across the room and adjust the lights manually.
Simultaneously, developments in expensive wireless technology have produced so-called “smart” LED bulbs, which use integral wireless communications to control the output of the LEDs in the bulb by communicating with a wireless computing device, such as a smartphone or a tablet computer. These smart bulbs allow the user to remotely change the brightness and/or color of their smart LED bulbs, but the technology cannot be used with conventional bulbs. The technology still requires manual intervention by the user when a change is desired, rather than anticipating the user's desire and changing the lighting independently. Accordingly, a need exists for a new self-adaptive scheduled lighting control aimed at overcoming the limitations associated with the prior art solutions.