We are having trouble with electricity here in my country these days. Sometimes electricity just goes off. Light becomes important at times like this. There are many possible solutions but I wanted to turn this into a project.
I am a kind of experienced using led strips. I am planning to place led strips some places. I will use a couple of old cell phone batteries to power the leds and use solar to charge them all the time. I will use li-ion charger circuit with protection and a voltage regulator.
Nothing wrong until here. But instead of using a separate switch I want to use regular wall switches. In my room 2 out of 4 of them unused. So I want to use the switch to turn on the leds.
To do so I thought a 433 mhz transmitter and receiver set would work fine. There are many tutorials about 433mhz transmitter-receiver modules. But all of them uses Arduinos. Since I want to just turn on or off the leds there won't be any data to encode and decode.
But I cannot find any tutorial about using these modules without Arduino. Is it not possible to do with the way I am trying to use? If not, what else can I do?
Yes that option is possible of course. But that requires external controller which is hard to find in a pitch black dark room. That is why I was planning to place the transmitter inside the wall switch with a battery probably.
Why not just hook up a line voltage relay to your mains and take a NC contact out of it and use that to switch the LED strip? Poor man's power fail detector.
@aarg If that is dangerous of course I won't try but do you have any suggestions?
@dougp That's possible of course. Is there any example projects? I searched for power fail triggered leds or similar terms but couldn't find something similar. There are some projects focusing other than leds but they seem too complicated for me.
Yes that option is possible of course. But that requires external controller which is hard to find in a pitch black dark room. That is why I was planning to place the transmitter inside the wall switch with a battery probably.
Tape or glue the "external controller" or transmitter to the wall, right next to the wall switch. Very safe, and MUCH easier to change the battery.
Gogatrone: @dougp That's possible of course. Is there any example projects? I searched for power fail triggered leds or similar terms but couldn't find something similar. There are some projects focusing other than leds but they seem too complicated for me.
Find a relay that is powered by 5V (they are common in the Arduino world), then you can just take a mobile phone charger and have it power the relay. The moment the power goes out, the phone charger loses power, and the relay is released.
Now connect your batteries through the relay to the LED (the NC side), and your battery powered LED lighting switches on the moment the power goes out, and off again when the power is back on.
No messing with line voltages, no changes to the wall switches, no need to manually flip a switch... Of course you may want to add a manual switch so you can switch off the LED when you want to go to sleep and the power is still out.