Hi guys,
So, I have a plan to monitor the temperature in my home office and when it is outside of certain ranges turn on / off the mains power to a blow heater.
The temp sensor part is quite simple, but I'm confused as to how I can get a socket turned on / off.
Can anyone offer guidance? I'm pretty much a beginner with Arduino so I'd like to steer clear of things that need transistors or plugging too much in on the breadboard.
Is it possible to maybe have some sort of device that plugs in to the switch and can be activated over bluetooth or similar to turn it on or off?
Thanks for your help in advance.
Also it's an Uno I have.
Hi - thanks for the suggestion but that looks a bit daunting at stage 1 of my Arduino career! Potentially needs soldering too.
Is there anything out there I can just plug a device in to (like on RF or Bluetooth) and send a signal to it from the Uno at all?
Then I suggest you stay away from mains power until you reach stage 2. That honestly is the absolute simplest and easiest thing to switch mains. It's not totally foolproof, but it will take a skillful and determined fool to do anything really bad.
Go play with some LEDs for a while until you get more comfortable with how the Arduino works. Get the blink-without-delay example sketch working with more than one LED.
The PowerSwitchTail is quite safe for beginners, especially if you follow Adafruit's tutorial. This one has the added complication of wireless (WiFi) control, which is not needed: