If this has been answered, a link would be great. I cannot believe that I cannot find this question already asked.
So here is what I am doing: Christmas lights! Yes, again....... I know it's been done too many times.
Here is what I am using:
- Arduino Nano
- TLC5940 Drivers
- sainsmart 16channel relay boards
This system will contain around 300 strands of Christmas lights on 64 different channels (maybe more) stretching down a hallway about 120 ft long.
My first plan was to make one master control box and place it in the center and run extension cords out from there. This is going to be a problem though, because of power consumption. About every 10ft I have an outlet available. Each outlet is on a separate breaker. I will need to spread my power use out over several breakers. This leads me to believe that my best bet is to have 16 channels in each outlet, which would be one sainsmart relay board and on of the tlc5940 drivers.
The question is this. Do I keep all of the tlc5940 drivers with the arduino in the master box and run the trigger lines to the distributed relay boards OR do I link only the signal wires for the drivers, and keep the drivers with the relay boards, OR do I need to figure something else out because this isn't possible?
The easiest way for me to link them would be with cat5 cable between boxes, which would give me 8 signal wires to play with. If I kept the drivers with the relay boards this would mean running one cat5 cable between each box, and I could daisy chain which would keep my wire usage down. This seems ideal. The only problem would be that I may have problems with the serial connection over a long distance through Ethernet.
The other possibility would be to keep all the drivers at the main box and run 2 cat5 cables to EACH box for the 16 channels. I would then need to HOPE that the common ground through the electrical panel is sufficient for the drivers to dump the transistors to ground, and I feel like I am running into all kinds of problems here.... It doesn't seem like a good plan, but could be necessary.
Plan C is.... Well, hopefully I don't need a plan C. If I do I suppose I can start playing with XBEE 900 or something dumb, (I only gravitate towards XBEE900 because I have used it several times before and I wouldn't have to learn something new) but ultimately this would be a massive pain. The other option would be to keep ALL of the relays in one location, run several different power sources to the centralized location to pull from different sources, and then run tons of really long extensions out of the one centralized control location, but this sucks because I will need hundreds of feet of extension cord to run 64 channels all over the hallway when I could put the boxes spaced throughout and use only short extension cords.
Let me know what you guys think. Can I get along with daisy chaining the tl5940 drivers through cat5 cables to have 4 boxes spaced every 24 feet or so?