Power line communication

I have an idea where I need to send a small data packets over the home power lines (similar to those network adapters you plug into the wall instead of using ethernet cables). Does anyone have any experience with such circuits? How small can I make them?

No experience of circuits like that and I'd consider it a very dangerous area to work in, but I've used commercial phone-over-mains and ethernet-over-mains adapters without any problems. Are the standard products out of the question in this case?

I want to make it small enough to act as an adapter between a light bulb and its socket.

Google X 10.

Bob

That idea has been thought of before, about 4 maybe 5 years ago. But it was put aside due to noise issues. Maybe it's being worked on again, but I wouldn't expect it any time soon.

40, maybe 50 years ago.

And I don't know why you would claim it doesn't work because of noise, there are many successful commercial implementations.

I was living in Florida at the time, and my friends father worked for the electric company. He was talking about how Comcast and the Keys power service wanted to combine and be able to make all communications through the power lines. After about a year, it was stopped and was complaining about noise issues.

I was involved with an ISP that was using the power lines as a backbone network around that sort of time. They were running it for quite a few years, but I don't know if they're still doing it.

If you pull apart a commercial power line ethernet adapter, you will see that the limitation on size
is the isolation transformer, thats used to isolate the mains side from the low level logic side.
Not much you can do to make this component physically smaller.

The X-10 TW523 Two-Way Power Line Interface is an option.
http://www.angelfire.com/tv2/fvazquez/docs/Electr/X-10_TW523.pdf
You could write your own protocol.

carrier current transmitter

The isolation transformer is a show stopper :frowning:

Hi,

I am interesting in this.

and what do you think about Powerline Modem like this : http://www.yamar.com/sig60.php