Forgive me - very new to Arduino and have never done anything with smart lighting - Yes, I know smart bulbs exist, but I am wondering about making my own. We are building a new home, the builder is rigid on customizations, but will let me do anything low-voltage I want to do. With lighting, going low-voltage, I wonder about the idea of placing an LED driver on each light, and running a low-voltage LED power pair, a driver power pair, and if we don't go wifi for control, then a data pair to the lights. Accounting for load and voltage-drop (it might very well end up still being a 12 gauge pair), I'd have multiple rooms on one circuit, but be able to control (on/off/dim) individual lights or in zones.
How would you do this? I know the Arduino can have PWM outputs for control of hard-wired LEDs but this would need to be either a wi-fi connection between the Arduino and LED drivers, or wired - a data bus. That's where my idea runs out of road; I need some direction.
I went for a WiFi enabled (ESP8266) board with a 16-channel PWM chip (PCA9685) and 16 onboard LED drivers.
All that's needed is a ~24volt supply to the board, and Cat-6 wires to the LED downlights.
These slaves (several) can cover one or two rooms each, and are controlled by a master AP.
Problem I'm facing now is that LED downlights with ~6 LEDs (or groups of LEDs) in series with a Vf of ~18-20volt are hard to get.
Until now I've been modding my own.
That's what I had a few years ago.
I went one step further, and de-centralised the LED drivers.
In my case it was easier to have one power wire instead of a bunch of Cat-6 wires to the other end of the house. That might be less of a problem with a newly build house.
It seems they also use a 24volt supply, and buck LED drivers.
They could be facing the same problems with the dwindling availability of ~20volt downlights.
To answer your PM. My advice is to buy a ready made system if you are not able do design the hardware and software yourself. This is not a walk in the park, and very time-consuming.
Leo..
Wawa:
My advice is to buy a ready made system if you are not able do design the hardware and software yourself. This is not a walk in the park, and very time-consuming.
Leo..
I'm prepared to design, as in lay it out and figure it out, trim it out and test it. I have a background in electronics but my component-level skills have about rusted away, aside from basic diodes, resistors and relays. I am not at this time able to design a custom LED driver board. I can code all day long. I'm new to this stuff, but my #1 hobby is working up custom Excel and Outlook stuff for work, using VBA. I've probably got 40,000 lines of code in my various projects. I do still need to figure out what I am running with, here. Not VBA, obviously.
So, what do you recommend for this project? I guess, in the context of off-the-shelf LED fixtures, but a Arduino and Raspberry Pi head-end?
All you need for PWMing leds or even talking to addressable WS leds.
You can also add a Webpage for control as well as timers, motion sensors the list is endless unlike the pin count.
And as mentioned slapping in an alexa interface is very easy.
And you still use the Arduino interface for writing code.
Can't remember what version of C Arduino is Cpp or C#.
Ahh it is all the same.!! just different words.
Did not play much with VBA but have written about 2 million lines of VB6 code.
I still use VB6 for anything I have to do on a PC as it is so simple and clutter free.