Home automation etc

Big Clive covered an interesting remote switch that requires no battery or wiring.

Similar things can be found online.

Sylvia.

Trevor Wilson wrote on 16/5/21 7:23 am:

When you type "do something about the garage lighting", do you mean inside garage or to get you from the house to the garage??

If the later, wouldn't "motion detector" type solar-lights do the job?? No fixed wiring, etc, to worry about. Or is that what you mean by "Turks"??

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Daniel

**A client presented me with one of those things for repair a couple of years back. Interesting, but not quite what I need.

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On Sun, 16 May 2021 19:13:24 +1000, Trevor Wilson scribed:

Is 600mm the new standard?

If you are going to dig, first plan out all the trenches you need, then take a 24 hour hire and go for your life.

When we shifted from single phone line to multi-lines for SOHO, it was cheaper for me to hire a digger and do it. Since I had it for 24 hours, I also put in a pile of drain lines at the time and a likely 'power to the back shed' line.

**Dunno if it is new, but it is the standard.

**Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. I have ZERO intention of digging up my back lawn. I dug a trench about 5 years ago, to run new power to the garage in the best, most practical place. Since that time, SWMBO planted a row of bushes. Given the constraints of my backyard, I would need to dig up her plants to lay more conduit. That ain't gonna happen. **See, the problem I have is that I had a concrete pool. It was removed. Well, not so much as removed, as demolished and the concrete rubble left in place around 300mm below the surface. Digging down 600mm almost anywhere in the yard would be a nightmare. I prefer an RF solution.

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**BTW: This appears to be the closest to what I am looking for:

Not all products are available in Australia.

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I rather assumed that even if the light is outside the garage, the wiring for it would go inside, so the controls would not need to be weather proof.

Sylvia.

**Indeed. In fact, I offered the weather proof outside switch to SWMBO, but, when she asked for the option to switch the lights on from the house, I ruled that out and sought other, more sophisticated options, like RF, Wi-Fi, etc.

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Not sure what you mean by "no wi-fi, but supplementary wi-fi would be a good thing"

Certainly, one doesn't want a device phoning-home to some unknown web site, much less relying on the Internet to work at all.

After some thought, I realised that simple RF solutions have the limitation that unless you can see whether changing the switch position had any effect, there needs to be two-way communication between the remote controller and the local switch, and WiFi makes sense for that.

If I had to implement this from scratch, then on the controller side I'd probably go with a microcontroller (something out of the PIC24 families), a serial-port Wifi module, and a latching relay driven by an H-bridge chip. I think all that could be driven via a capacitive dropper (charge a capacitor to operate the relay coil).

The quiescent power drain is dominated by the Wifi module. At least some such modules can act as an access point.

On the switch side, omit the H-bridge chip and relay. One could design a circuit board for both parts, and just not fully populate the switch side.

Sylvia.

**Sorry, I didn't explain it very well. Here goes:

I want a primarily RF system. I do not want a system that relies only on a cell 'phone/wi-fi system.

**Correct. **I am confident that there is an off-the-shelf solution available.

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UPB (Universal Powerline Bus) seems to be a common name for the commercial devices using powerline communications:

There are a few manufacturers, but I'm not sure if there are any Aus distributors (too many false results when I search "UPB lighting control Australia").

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Why use a pic when the ESP32 has both a micro-controller (2 CPUs) and built in WiFi.

Both are rated 240v at 10A although I wouldn't actually try to push 10 amps through one.

Mainly familiarity with programming a PIC24.

Sylvia.

if you program in C or C++ there would be little difference. I use one of the Arduino IDEs to program it.

There'd be a lot of difference regarding the how the registers behave, and the custom language extensions recognised by the compiler.

That's more the point rather than programming in C or C++. If you already access everything via Arduino libraries then it might seem easy to switch platforms. It's not the most efficient way to program a microcontroller though.

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Or one could get away from WiFi by using something like this to implement a two way protocol, though then one has to do something about security (if one cares that much in the case of lighting control). It does have a lower quiescent power consumption.

Sylvia.

C is C, the only real difference comes with what capabilities a processor has and I/O

How so? Even in microcontrollers efficiency is not as important as it used to be unless you are going to produce something in the millions.

It's exactly here that things go wrong. Having interposed third party libraries just makes things harder to figure out when the MCU doesn't behave as expected.

Sylvia.