Light Home automation

Hi all

I'm new to Arduino and now got an idea for a project : home automation
I thought a good way to start this project was to control lights with the Ardunio, but the problem is I got no idea on where to start. Do I need an extra shield ? How would the lights connect to the Arduino ? Would it be possible to control the lights with an android phone ?

Could someone please help me out, or send me a linke to a good tutorial.
Thanks a lot !

P.S. With lights I don't mean LED

Best place to start would be to read the previous project post in this group and decide on the specifics you want to implement.

I've just got mine set up and working, just using an LED at the moment but soon be wiring in to a fish tank light. Take a look at LED Control with Arduino Ethernet Shield Web Server at the bottom of the page is the sketch I used and just modified the ip and mac etc to my specs so...

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

I've recently found that controlling the lights in the house was easiest when using a known manufacturer for the light switches (such as Lightwave RF) then using existing libraries to send RF commands using a small RF module (434Mhz). There are some quite comprehensive libraries around whereas other users have reverse engineered the RF protocol used in the vendor's implementation.

If you didn't feel like building your own from scratch, I'm just about to post my code for home automation. It allows: Digital On / off using pins, analogue (servo) control using pins, Lightwave RF commands and a timer function for all of the above. Rather than programming each Arduino with separate code, there are 2 programs. 1 to program the board (in which settings are saved on the EEPROM) and then other to simply run continuously and respond to commands meant for it.

I am currently controlling it via my Android at home and away from home too (handy if you think you might have left some lights on). It's also controlling the garden hoses and TV / audio equipment.

Hi,

there are several post of home automation, I'm working on this, have a look.
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=80589.0

Regards,
Dario.