Hi,
I'm a general handyman, I can operate a crane, wire a house, replace a head gasket... Now I want to add lamp builder. 40 years ago I bought a Lamp that had a plant around the base.. When you touch the plant leaf, it turns on the light.. touch the leaf again it turns it off.
This is a live plant and it has been changed over the years. This year it stopped working and I took it apart. there is a wire that runs to a copper foil that is under the soil... I replaced the foil and re-soldered the wire and it's great again..
Now my granddaughter (19 months) loves to play with it so I wanted to build her one..
I tried using a replacement touch lamp switch but it would only work when touching the soil or the stems of the plant, close to the soil.. not sensitive enough.. So rethinking it I want to try using a 5V Capacitive Touch Sensor (Phidgets) to turn on and off a 12V LED Light bulb.
In my limited understanding, I start with a 12VDC power supply, run that to some type of controller that will send 5VDC to the sensor and send 12V to feed a relay. The 5V signal back to the relay switches the relay on and the 12V goes through to the light.
I fear I must be wrong because the relay needs to switch the light on... and have it stay on until it's touched again and then go off.. I think this would only work if you kept holding it..
Space is limited so, do I need a controller? With a controller do I need a relay? Should I use an Arduino? Do they have different sizes? How would you attack this?
I would like to make a few points learned the "hard way." The "hard way" was designing, building, and coding and continually testing a system to enable switching the music (iTunes from my PC) between 2 pairs of speakers.
The latching-switch (effectively DPDT) is the first task. This part was tested without the relay and its portion of the work. This portion would be pure Arduino (bread-board), with 2 LEDs to indicate switch states.
Your control circuitry would switch an SPST relay on or off to turn the lamp on or off. You can use a 5vdc SPST relay. A 12VDC component should not be powered through the Arduino circuit. I burned out two (I am slow to learn) Arduino UNOs before I realised that the 12 volt push was too harsh.
Even with the 5VCD relay I was spooked enough to use an "OPTOCONTROL" to switch the relay. The optocontrol takes a light-current signal (digital-write HIGH) to trigger a switching transistor in the same case. If you use a 12-volt relay I know that you will need the Optocontrol.
I hope that this helps you. Cheers. Tom Kane / Vancouver, BC, Canada
Thanks Tom. I'm definitely new to this but I'm older now and have some time on my hands to learn.. Watching Paul McWhorter's tutorials is very helpful , as is finding out that 12V is disagreeable with the Arduino.
Still I now need to look up DPDT, SPST, latch switching and OPTOCONTROL.
I remember when I went into teaching.. the jargon was new and needed to be learned.. feeling that again.. Thank you for your input!
What you need for this is a TTP223 module, dirt cheap and you need no Arduino or toggle circuit as it does it all for you. You do still need the relay module to switch the lamp.
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