Hi guys,
I recently purchased a HID grow lamp and ballast however im looking to use an Arduino as a light management controller. The company who made the ballast sent me the attached document and I was wondering if there was a way I could use some sort of serial.write() to control the ballast using my Arduino.
Thankyou in advance!
Ballast.pdf (452 KB)
isaacs77:
Hi guys,
I recently purchased a HID grow lamp and ballast however im looking to use an Arduino as a light management controller. The company who made the ballast sent me the attached document and I was wondering if there was a way I could use some sort of serial.write() to control the ballast using my Arduino.
Thankyou in advance!
Certainly, if you are up to reverse engineering their controller.
Paul
Hi ive tried to pull the data from the microcontroller on the PCB however it is apparently impossible.
They use a rs485 signal and I was wondering if you know of any way to read this signal and maybe replicate it with my own microcontroller?
isaacs77:
Hi ive tried to pull the data from the microcontroller on the PCB however it is apparently impossible.
They use a rs485 signal and I was wondering if you know of any way to read this signal and maybe replicate it with my own microcontroller?
Then you should have mention in your first post that you have the controller in hand and the electrical part of the serial is RS-485.
Did you study the signal with a recording oscilloscope?
There are boards available to convert the Arduino TTL serial to RS-485. Did you use one?
Paul
I have not used an oscilloscope as wouldn't it only show me waveforms? I have this device:
and i have used it to learn that the signal being sent from the controller is 0x1A 0x00 0x00 0x1F 0x00
i tried to send that signal using the same setup to the ballast however nothing happened ( the controller light on the ballast did not flash like it does when its connected to an actual controller)
I can only presume that the aforementioned hardware is not bi-directional and cannot send output signals.
or maybe there is some form of signal acknowledgment between the ballast and the controller i have not picked up?
Is there any way i can use an Arduino to send this signal?
i appreciate your assistance.