Hey all
This is my first post, and I just started to experiment with Arduino.
I have a home cinema in the basement that I would like to control the lighting with dimmer 220v spotlights. I do not know what I should do but wish that when I press the play button on the remote so I wish it dims down from 100% to 0%, and when I press the Pause / Stop button, I want to go from 0% to 100% light. I read an article about controlling Arduino with IR but it was more turned on and off by remote control I want dimmer function. Someone who is good at this
You will need to base it off the article that you read about turning the light on and off except you will need to change the switching device to a dimmer type circuit.
You would most likely control the dimmer circuit via PWM.
The item described in your first link can only handle 2amps continuous so that wouldn't be good if all your lights in you theatre are incandescent. You may need to use several of them and they're quite pricey. The other one says it can handle up to 12 amps but I'm skeptical because the Triac is not heat sinked. The second problem with that one is it's only serial or parallel controlled. Arduino's don't seem to do several serial controlled devices all that well. (someone correct me if I'm wrong on this point) Parallel uses a lot of pins and to control more that one unit would require a lot of pins or multiplexing them.
Here's some links that may help you.
The guy in the first article seems to say that a PWM Dimmer is not a good idea but I haven't read through the whole thing yet. Its pretty long.
All the other ones show you how to use PWM for a dimmer.
If your not afraid of high voltage build them your self.
technogeekca:
The other one says it can handle up to 12 amps but I'm skeptical because the Triac is not heat sinked. The second problem with that one is it's only serial or parallel controlled. Arduino's don't seem to do several serial controlled devices all that well. (someone correct me if I'm wrong on this point)
It does not look as though the triac is bonded to the pcb, so you can probably carefully bend it away and attach a heatsink.
I don't see why Arduino could not control this board with serial. Only one way to find out for sure. With an Uno/Nano etc, you would need to use the SoftwareSerial library to create a new serial output, set to 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit (that's probably the default anyway).
PaulRB:
I don't see why Arduino could not control this board with serial. Only one way to find out for sure. With an Uno/Nano etc, you would need to use the SoftwareSerial library to create a new serial output, set to 9600 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit (that's probably the default anyway).
That was not quite my point.
I don't see any reason why the Arduino couldn't control it via serial either.
I was stating that I think the Arduino is only really meant to have one serial I/O and that control a few or several of these would be difficult and resource hungry. (again please correct me if I'm wrong about this.