lightning control

Do you mean 'lighting'? If yes, the TRIAC is the most common way.

-- Chaos Master®, posting from Brazil. "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence." -- Anonymous

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not" - Kurt Cobain

The Evanescen(t/ce) HP:

For home lightning control, mount at least one lightning rod on the roof of the house, and use cable to get a good earth ground.

For home lighting control of incandescents, most controls use triacs.

Good luck either way. Chris

Use a kite with a tinsel string and a key at the end. ;-)

haha funny sorry i meant lighting control well im trying to control a normal light bulb 100 watts maybe via a micrcontroller that will recieve the command from a central station using zigbee i thought i could use one of the general i/o ports of the mcu but im not sure what else i would be missing to control the triac do you guys have any suggestions? thanks in advance!

w_tom writes within:

Exactly, I forgot this. This is what replying when you're tired gives.

-- Chaos Master®, posting from Brazil. "Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence." -- Anonymous "I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not" - Kurt Cobain

The Evanescen(t/ce) HP:

On Thursday 23 September 2004 12:56 pm, eYeLess did deign to grace us with the following:

If you don't already know how to drive a triac gate from a uC pin, you'd probably be better off with solid state relays. Just input a DC voltage and they control the line. And they're already isolated.

Good Luck! Rich

You might want to look into triac driver chips like the MOC3061. These take logic-level inputs and provide isolated drive to a triac. They do all the zero-crossing detection stuff for you.

Best regards,

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis