Hello, everyone.
This post contains a lot of questions about different areas whose common end is understand the feasebility of my project. Therefore I think Project Guidance is the most appropriate section for posting.
I have done most of the examples distributed with the IDE, and I have to confirm arduino is a great platform!
I am now embarking on a home automation project for which I need some guidance.
I have to
- turn on and off, as I request from my Smartphone App, some 30 sensors through transistors ( probably BC337-40);
- monitor that such sensors are working properly throug analog input pins;
- read sensor output through analog input pins
Before buying all components, I need to ensure that what I have in mind is feaseble:
- enable/disable these sensors by providing 5V each
- communicate with the sensors through long wires ( between 10m and 30m).
Since more pins than available are needed, I am thinking of setting up arduino on a breadboard as detailed at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone and then add the pins I need. Would that be to difficult to do? I have seen there are shields and mux/demux solutions for this. However I think that just adding pins to the circuit in the breadboard would be easier. Can this be done?
For switching sensors on/off I am using the circuit shown in the images attached. Is there any change that I can share such circuit among the different sensor, or do I have to create one for each of them?