Making My Touchless Faucet Alexa Aware

Other Hardware Home Automation
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Hi Everyone,

I recently purchased a "flow brand" touchless faucet and it is working great (picture enclosed). It consists of a sensor portion and a control box that "listens" to the sensor and turns the faucet on/off. I think it would be even better if I could use Alexa to turn the faucet on/off.

The idea:

  1. add a black box in between the sensor and the control box consisting of mostly an IOT Arduino which will communicate to the IOT Cloud
    1a) When the feed says "toggle", use the arduino to tell the control box to turn on/off the faucet. In other words, make the control box think it is getting the motion signal from the sensor.
    1b) Obviously, motion detected from the sensor directly should work as it used to.

  2. use the IFTTT service to enable Alexa to update the Arduino "Thing"

The devil is in the details, of course. I have been able to prototype (2) easily. I can tell Alexa to toggle the faucet, which updates (through IFTTT) the Thing, which makes the Arduino IOT toggle an LED... Piece of cake.

I have two main obstacles to step (1). One, I don't seem to find the female and male cables that connect the faucet sensor to the control box. I was hoping to not have to cut and strip the original cables, but instead connect both the faucet cable and control box to my black box directly. After searching for over a week, it seems like the cables are manufactured only for these touchless faucets. I am hoping someone here with experience with cable connectors might point me to a source. I will post a picture in the upload section. I found company on the alibaba site that seems to call them "Type B", but you can't buy just the cables. If you notice carefully, the top two leads closest to the notch are bigger than the bottom two.

The other problem I have is that I had assumed that in order to tell the control box to turn on the faucet I would simply need to short certain pins together, but that does not seem to be the case. I think there must be some "protocol" from the faucet sensor to the control box, but after googling for days, I have not found it. Maybe this is a well known thing? Is there a known protocol for communicating with IR proximity. Perhaps some sort of xx kHz wave line tv remotes?

Thanks in advance for any help,
Jose

Faucet.PNG
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Weird Connector 2.PNG

Weird Connector.png

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@ieee488: I appreciate your link, but it did not answer any of the questions I asked.

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Anyone?

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"Anyone?"

If you read the "read me first" pinned topics in the topic areas, these will tell you how to make your pictures directly viewable instead of having to be downloaded. That might generate more interest in your post. As to the connectors, the large electronic suppliers probably have them, you might send the pictures to their tech support teams. You may be able to make some temporary jumpers that you can tap into to do some investigation.