Any recommendations re how to use Arduino to meet the requirements I have below?
Requirement
Display the status of several door open/closed sensors in the kitchen.
Display could be as simple as a LED for each door sensor (which I could put into a status panel)
Connection between door sensors and status panel display would need to be wireless
Note - I was looking at X10 originally and was thinking of Arduino for controlling a display, but now I’m wondering whether I would need X10 at all. Perhaps there is an Arduino only approach? (unless from a cost perspective it’s cheaper to use X10 devices for the sensors to send X10 on/off over RF, and then use an Ardunio connected to an X10 interface).
IR Proximity switches / hall sensors / Simple LED + LDR with a Comparator should give a logical signal which can then be transferred using RF. This can be done without an Arduino with each sensor unit costing about 10$.
you can use encoders and decoders. These are available in various bit configurations like 4bit, 8 bit, 10bit, 16 bit, etc. i think in your case 4 bit should be enough. You would need multiple transmitters and one receiver. If you plan it out with a bit of wiring, you can do 4 doors sharing corners between them into a single 4 bit data stream and reduce on the costing. But this depends upon the layout of doors.
thanks pracas but I think without a strawman design to start with I'll probably flounder here - don't suppose you have a link to a design that describes what you're talking about in more detail
(otherwise what I can make sense of at the moment as there are some articles I've found is using an Arduino at either end with an RF Tx and RF Rx + use of the Ardunio VirtualWire library)