Controlling a power winch wirelessly

Projects General Guidance
1

I have a project in which I need to control a motor wirelessly. The motor in this case is a clarke power winch

This is quite a high power motor, and I was wondering if it was not only feasible to do this, but if so, how I would go about wirelessly controlling it. Would an arduino be able to handle something like this or would it be a separate wireless controller?

An app that is used to control it also would be ideal. I have looked for similar projects online but I only tend to find smaller ac motors being used, and am not sure if this would be feasible

2

Have a look: wireless winch control at DuckDuckGo

One question: Is the goal a DIY project with an Arduino or, is it to have a functioning winch control?

3

Hello hfindle

Ask an electrican to replace the handcontrol by a relays box with a 5 volt control input and an emergency cut out.

4

It is all doable based on an arduino. But you may need additional high-current 230V components.

Your winch-motor must rotate clockwise and anticlockwise for winding up or winding down. This means the cable-based remote-switches are changing more than one wire to make changing the rotation-direction possible.

An Arduino Uno or Arduino Nano has no wireless cabability on board.
You would need some additional kind of wireless signal-transmission.

There are other microcontrollers that have wireless onboard.
But you have said nothing about the maximum distance between your remote sender and remote receiver.

And if your environment is EMV-noise or not.
Do you have always WiFi active ?

Back to controlling. Without knowing what wiring is inside the cabled-remote-box it is unclear if the cabled-remote-box does switch

  • 230V high current power
    or
  • some kind of low-voltage inputs that activate something inside the winch intself
    or
  • 230V low current -signals initiating the high-current-switching inside the winch-housing.

And as this is unlcear this is the reason why user @paulpaulson wrote

best regards Stefan

5

IF the winch controller uses relays for all the control, then, yes, and an Arduino could be used to control and possible have a wireless control.

6

Would a Bluetooth module be OK for the wireless capability? Maybe a HC or HM?

The distance would never change, the winch is 2 floors from the test location, so about 6m would be the range

WiFi is always active and there will not be any noise in between,

How would the wiring of the cabled-remote box effect the operation of the device also?

7

Two floors inbetween and 6m will result in an unreliable connection with bluetooth.

You should do tests how strong the RSSI-value of the WiFi is

This is a too generalised worded question.
The too generalised answers is:
This depends on multiple factors.

You will have to describe in much more detail what you mean
if you want decent advice on that.

If I try to give an answer as a shot into the darkness
It depends on if the wired box is replaced with your wireless remote-control or if it will be wired in parallel.

But as you haven't even provided a wiring-diagram of the wired box if it uses switches or realys
what voltages are switched inside the box.

Without these informations you are still far away from realising.
If you refuse to take this effort
go buy a ready to use wireless product off the shelf

best regards Stefan

8

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