how to increase more I/O pins with all individual controls

I am trying to contorl more Appliances connected to in my home. My needs makes me to control the appliances single or multiple at a time.

Please help me in increasing more I/O pins.(even with many micro controller if solution needed)

How many, and how are they controlled?
There are many expansion options.

How many, and how are they controlled?
There are many expansion options.

nearly 100 appliances, controlled by android application through wishiled.

What is "wishiled" ?

http://asynclabs.com/store?page=shop.product_details&product_id=26&vmcchk=1
I guess it's a shield

And what are the appliances? 120V items? 240V items? How are wired now, or how will they be wired?

I have a 2000 sq ft, 2 story home I don't think we even have 50 dual plug outlets, let alone 100 appliances.

And what are the appliances? 120V items? 240V items? How are wired now, or how will they be wired?

i am connecting 240v items(fan, tubelight, blub,..etc).

5v supply is connected in switch and apliances are connected with relay.

so i can control both in switch board and using android mobile which will control appliances connected to the relay.

hello, please help me.

You may want to take a look at serial to parallel shift register chips. It turns 3 I/O pins into 8. They can also be cascaded, so 3 pins can become 16, 24 ,32... depending on how many chips you link together.

Basically you feed them a byte value (0-255, which is an 8 digit number in binary) and the 0s and 1s correspond to 8 pins on the chip which then become high or low. So lets say you want to turn pins 2 4 and 5 high and keep the rest low. You'll want to send it the value of 176 which is "010110000" in binary notation.

How long is your wiring expected to be?

Using a single master Arduino for an entire house has pros and cons but for my money the main con is wire length as I think AWOL is alluding to.

Unless it's a very small house the wires will be too long for reliable sensing and maybe even control. Also of course you need 100 wires.

My preference would be for a network of small controllers, say one for each room. The down side is that the programming gets more complicated.


Rob

Graynomad:
the wires will be too long for reliable sensing and maybe even control.


Rob

For sensing definitely, but maybe not for control if everything is either high or low to control a relay. Nevertheless, the I/O board could never energize 100 relays on it's own. I'd certainly use general purposes npn transistors and have them trigger the relays with 12v. That way I don't think the length of wire would be an issue, so long as the gauge is reasonable.

-Tony

i am getting an idea to use many arduino boards. one is master arduino board and many slaves to it. master arduino should send a data to all the slave arduino boards, all at the same time slaves should recogonise that the data is sent to the particular slave to Switch ON particular appliances.

will this work effectively.

will this work effectively.

Yep.

Have a good search through the forum there's 100s of post about such things but as I said above a network of Arduinos connected with RS-485 is one way to go.


Rob

Graynomad:

will this work effectively.

I said above a network of Arduinos connected with RS-485 is one way to go.

i am new to networks. please help me to understand this networks and RS-485

Start here

AWOL:
Start here

help me with the networks please to increase more i/o pins with individual controls

You may also want to look at X10:

Easy to control lots of appliances without actually "connecting" your arduino to the power line.
Also, there are lots of projects out there already from which you can get some inspiration.

The theory of networking with RS-485 is simple enough, connect N devices all on the same 3 wires (2 signal and 1 GND) and make one of them the master.

The master periodically asks the slaves for data and/or tells them to do something.

As always though the devil is in the details, serial comms is by nature not 100% reliable and you can't have everyone talk at once so you need to design a protocol. This can be very simple or very complicated. In your case I'd go for simple and having a master/slave arrangement helps with that.

An example is maybe this

Master sends

<12 ?>

Meaning that node #12 should reply with information from it's sensors. The < and > help with error detection and syncing with the data.

The slave replies with

<1234,5678,2233,4455>

Being the reading from four sensors.

This isn't within a bull's roar of being a robust protocol but it's simple and the sort of thing most people doing this seem happy with.

FWIW I'm working on this very sort of thing right now, the design document is 40 pages long and will probably double in size before it's finished. That's the level of work needed for a fairly robust solution IMO, but the above will get you started with something simple.


Rob