Around the world, every city offers something different. Though they all have hustle and bustle, lots of buildings, and usually traffic, when you’re on their streets you would never mistake San Francisco for Cairo, Toronto for Tokyo, or Berlin for Rio de Janeiro. But what about from space? During the day, these cities tend to blend in with their surrounding countryside. However, when lit up at night, it’s easy to see how varied these cities can be.

Is it possible to tell anything about the life and culture of our cities when viewing their lights from above? You might be surprised at how much.

Landmarks

Can you guess which cultural icon jumps out of this landscape?

Now, take a look at this photograph of Denver, a much newer city. The streets are mapped out in a much more orderly, grid-like way, aligned North-South and East-West.

The majority of urban areas in Tokyo use green mercury vapor lamps. Only the most newly built areas glow the standard orange.

Development

When examining a city’s lights from above, you can also learn about development, community growth, and infrastructure. Check out this unique photo of two cities from two countries side-by-side – the border towns Cuidad Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas.

The majority of contractors and building owners are creating networks that interconnect all the components. These provide a single point of monitoring and control the different types of devices, sensors, and equipment.

While wiring the building during the construction phase is the ideal situation, modifying or upgrading existing systems can be challenging.

As the building gets bigger and more complex, so does its automation, making it a real task to interconnect all components. It may require hybrid systems consisting of the UTP, RS-232/RS-485, wired and wireless networks, and a variety of protocols. However, there is still a need to unify all these. It’s best to have a single point of managing and controlling the devices regardless of the style, location, function, and type of network.

As building automation evolves, there are now industry standard network protocols that allow people to interconnect components from different manufacturers. The three most commonly used interoperable protocols in use today include:

Building automation enables efficient control of the various systems and conditions in the building. This allows the occupants and owners to save costs, while improving comfort and living conditions. It adds the ability to automatically monitor and adjust the lighting, air conditioning, heating, ventilation, security and other parameters. Specific benefits include:

Building automation offers several benefits to the owners and occupants of the facilities. It allows the savings of resources such as energy and water while improving the conditions and comfort of the space.

As building automation networking evolves, equipment and applications from different manufacturers are able to work together via standard interfaces and protocols. This allows consumers to benefit from the latest technology and decreases our ecological footprint.