Home Automation Lighting

Surprisingly there is not a lot of information about controlling your house lighting with arduino. My goal it to control my house lighting with my arduino and have the manual switches still work. I also want to know the status of the lights. I am having some serious trouble figuring out how to do this. My first thought is it might have to be wireless because there are a few light switches and having a board at each switch does not sound efficient. Dose any one have any ideas or experience to help me get started?

I've looked into this a bit, but everything turns out to be quite expensive. I want to use wireless to avoid messing up the walls, but everything seems to cost too much. Haven't given up, but haven't found a solution either. X10 (I have a few of those) is just too darn unreliable.

I am using my arduino to control my lights via Domotic home on the cheap... c eck out my blog if your interested in finding out more... I am going to build my house soon and will be looks ng at something like MQTTand what john has used over at SuperHouse Episodes – SuperHouse Automation

I am using rc-switch and cheap 315mhz to control my.lights... I don't get the status of the lights just yet but I'm working on that at the momdnt .

HumpA

For my set-up, I have an Arduino with Ethernet connected to another atmega chip w/ a HopeRF transceiver acting as a base station. The lights have a small custom board with an ATTiny84, transceiver and a latching relay. After the initial base station cost, it's about $10-15 per node. The latching relay is double pole, so I use that to determine the status. That's been the cheapest I can get it without running wires.

The double pole latching relay is a really good idea. I've just been sampling the state of the output pin, which tells me what I told it to do, but not the actual result.

draythomp:
I've just been sampling the state of the output pin, which tells me what I told it to do, but not the actual result.

Sort of. I believe pins are wired so reading an output reads the actual state of the pin. In other words, it is possible to read LOW after writing HIGH if the output driver has failed.

first of all sorry for my english :smiley:

made something like that for my home,

i live in argentina (220v here) and found some dimmer light-switches (capacitive ones) that got connection for a "slave" unit...

quick touch turns on/off
dimmers when holding....

closing the circuit between the slave and the Live wire works as pressing the key.... (mine is done with uln2803 and 5v relays)

got some pictures from my (up to now incomplete) setup attached,

charlie (again sorry for my grammatical murder :P)

more pictures....

setup:

atmega 2560 ---- touchOSC ---- Processing

2 rgb Led strips

2 UV Led strips

2 light dimmers

future ir control (trying to make it work right)
future voice control (Processing Voce library)
future temperature/humidity/light sensors...

send me a PM if someone whats some of the code (arduino/processing) or more info

(again sorry for my english)

Looks very interesting, I have done an Iphone APP to control lighting and RGB led strip with Arduino. I use it with wire relays, I wonder if it could work with latching relays with double pole. If someone are interested to tested it, i'll be glad to give away a promo code to download my app for free.
you can see it here: www.cromalight.com

Hi,
I'm working on something similar...
At the moment I have an arduino ethernet as base which controls via i2c one pca9586 (16channel PWM driver) and one pca8575(16 channel i2c expander, outputs used as switches).
To control low voltage devices (PWM, led stripes, 12V DC halogen lamps etc) I use a MOSFET as driver. For 230V AC devices I will use solid state relais with integrated optical coupler for safety.

The whole thing is controlled via ethernet from a webserver which also visualizes the actual state.

For the future I plan:

  • Spoken feedback :slight_smile:
  • Voice recognition
  • Intelligent light controlling if e.g. I leave the room and re-enter the room
  • Heater controlling
  • some degree of "learning"

charlie_dream:
more pictures....

setup:

atmega 2560 ---- touchOSC ---- Processing

2 rgb Led strips

2 UV Led strips

2 light dimmers

future ir control (trying to make it work right)
future voice control (Processing Voce library)
future temperature/humidity/light sensors...

send me a PM if someone whats some of the code (arduino/processing) or more info

(again sorry for my english)

If you still want to add voice recognition to you home automation project, I suggest you check this out:

Arrch:
For my set-up, I have an Arduino with Ethernet connected to another atmega chip w/ a HopeRF transceiver acting as a base station. The lights have a small custom board with an ATTiny84, transceiver and a latching relay. After the initial base station cost, it's about $10-15 per node. The latching relay is double pole, so I use that to determine the status. That's been the cheapest I can get it without running wires.

Could you share your schematic?

andrelcm:
Could you share your schematic?

I ditched the latching relay and went with a standard one, but here's the schematic for the receiving device. It's actually broken into a main board and relay shield, but here is the schematic for them combined:

*Edit: First picture had incorrect wiring to the relay; fixed.
*Edit2: There is also a missing flyback diode that I'm too lazy to go back and fix

Hello. I have developed a home automation system that let us to use any switch as a commutator, and know the state of the equipment connected to it. About the equipment, it can be lights, it can be air conditioning, it can be motorized blinds... everything with minus than 16 A.

I have a thread in spanish where I have published the schematic of the board that I designed to do it, and it works perfectly with Arduino. The communication is through Xbee. Later I have designed my own control and power boards based on the previous prototipes and 100% compatibles with the Arduino platform, but with a transfo and communication module integrated in the control board.

Now I am starting to sell my solution.

You can check all the information about my home automation system at the following Arduino forum: http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,92963.0.html

You also have english explanations at my web page (it has english section): www.functiodomo.com

I will follow this thread and I will try to collaborate.

Hello everyone;
Home Automation Lighting is exactly what i am gonna do. In my project we can control lights using computer via internet(I think with arduino web server). Also control with my android phone. I want to make an android application for this.
But i am not sure which arduiono is fit to my project. I think 'Arduino Mega ADK' and 'Arduino Ethernet Shield w/o PoE R3' is enough for me. I dont know this things is compatible for each other. I am new with arduino. I dont wanna buy wrong things. Please help me to choose and give me hint for good starting.
Best regards...

takiya_genji:
Hello everyone;
Home Automation Lighting is exactly what i am gonna do. In my project we can control lights using computer via internet(I think with arduino web server). Also control with my android phone. I want to make an android application for this.
But i am not sure which arduiono is fit to my project. I think 'Arduino Mega ADK' and 'Arduino Ethernet Shield w/o PoE R3' is enough for me. I dont know this things is compatible for each other. I am new with arduino. I dont wanna buy wrong things. Please help me to choose and give me hint for good starting.
Best regards...

Hello takiya_gengi:

Everything you want to do is possible with Arduino. In fact, my home automation system functiodomo is done with it.

About the PCB that you need you have to consider that you need for each control PCB (Arduino) , 1 transformer, one communication board and one power board to work over the 220VAC.

You can see a scheme at my thread:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,92963.30.html (the post of castillo14 are mine; it is in spanish, but I think that the schemes are clear)

You can find more information about it at my web http://www.functiodomo.com where you have an english section.

Anyway, after I built a prototipe, I decided to design my own PCBs (100% compatible with Arduino platform) to achieve a easier installation. You can see them at this english tread: http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,116788.0.html

takiya_genji:
Hello everyone;
Home Automation Lighting is exactly what i am gonna do. In my project we can control lights using computer via internet(I think with arduino web server). Also control with my android phone. I want to make an android application for this.
But i am not sure which arduiono is fit to my project. I think 'Arduino Mega ADK' and 'Arduino Ethernet Shield w/o PoE R3' is enough for me. I dont know this things is compatible for each other. I am new with arduino. I dont wanna buy wrong things. Please help me to choose and give me hint for good starting.
Best regards...

Hello takiya_gengi:

I understand that you wanted to tell us something about my previous entry, but it does not appear. Can you repeat the post?

Thanks.