IR Blaster (progress)
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My wife and I were in Italy for the past 3 weeks with friends and family so I didn't have much time to work on the IR Blaster actuator. That said, the long flights back and forth from San Francisco to Italy afforded some concentrated time to finalize the design sufficient for public review before procuring a few prototype boards. To goal of this post is to solicit said feedback so "bring it on" after reading the details below.
@Sparkman - The biggest change is the addition of two more IR LEDs given we are now driving the circuit with a MOSFET (thanks @tbowmo) that can handle higher-current loads; this reduces the risk of IR coverage holes and increases the IR LED component options. However, I have not added a barrel connector for external LEDs to the PCB (yet?) because there are still open issues regarding circuit design to accommodate it (would welcome integration ideas).
I also have not laid the traces for A0, A1, and A2 because these are completely optional inputs, the 3 traces are difficult to place given the physical PCB layout and in fact they may not survive the final board.
Everything is in GitHub in case people want to review the details offline.
The PCB design follows - I had to increase the size of the PCB slightly to accommodate the two additional LEDs.
Here are two renders of the board, sans the radio daughterboard:
Finally, here is the version 0.4 schematic.
I have also developed a MySensor's IR Sensor Array that will enable me to measure the IR radiant intensity from different points in a room under varying ambient lighting scenarios. The test scenario is that an IR Sensor Array controller will illuminate the IR Blaster and then broadcast to all the IR Sensor Nodes to collect an IR measurement over a specified interval and report the IR level results back to the Sensor Array Controller at which point it will turn off the IR Blaster IRs and log the sensor node results for analysis. This should allow me to select IR LEDs to ensure maximum radiant luminosity without any IR coverage holes/gaps across the 180 degree radiance field. As an interesting side note, the development of the Sensor Array found a messaging limitation in the current MySensors.org library that @hek is planning to address in the next major release.
Ciao,
Bruce -
My wife and I were in Italy for the past 3 weeks with friends and family so I didn't have much time to work on the IR Blaster actuator. That said, the long flights back and forth from San Francisco to Italy afforded some concentrated time to finalize the design sufficient for public review before procuring a few prototype boards. To goal of this post is to solicit said feedback so "bring it on" after reading the details below.
@Sparkman - The biggest change is the addition of two more IR LEDs given we are now driving the circuit with a MOSFET (thanks @tbowmo) that can handle higher-current loads; this reduces the risk of IR coverage holes and increases the IR LED component options. However, I have not added a barrel connector for external LEDs to the PCB (yet?) because there are still open issues regarding circuit design to accommodate it (would welcome integration ideas).
I also have not laid the traces for A0, A1, and A2 because these are completely optional inputs, the 3 traces are difficult to place given the physical PCB layout and in fact they may not survive the final board.
Everything is in GitHub in case people want to review the details offline.
The PCB design follows - I had to increase the size of the PCB slightly to accommodate the two additional LEDs.
Here are two renders of the board, sans the radio daughterboard:
Finally, here is the version 0.4 schematic.
I have also developed a MySensor's IR Sensor Array that will enable me to measure the IR radiant intensity from different points in a room under varying ambient lighting scenarios. The test scenario is that an IR Sensor Array controller will illuminate the IR Blaster and then broadcast to all the IR Sensor Nodes to collect an IR measurement over a specified interval and report the IR level results back to the Sensor Array Controller at which point it will turn off the IR Blaster IRs and log the sensor node results for analysis. This should allow me to select IR LEDs to ensure maximum radiant luminosity without any IR coverage holes/gaps across the 180 degree radiance field. As an interesting side note, the development of the Sensor Array found a messaging limitation in the current MySensors.org library that @hek is planning to address in the next major release.
Ciao,
Bruce -
@ServiceXp said:
@blacey Really lovin this.. You plan to sell?
If there is enough community interest and demand, we (@hek et. al.) will offer the IR Blaster in the same fashion as @tbowmo's pioneering and very successful Sensebender Micro and hopefully in-development Gateway Device that I am personally jazzed about. Any proceeds from IR Blaster hardware sales will go directly to supporting the MySensors.org project (monthly hosting fees, etc.). So to answer that question we need to know who else would buy one if we make it available so we can estimate the batch size for an initial run. Anyone interested is encouraged to weigh in here.
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I would be interested in at least one of them. (I'm thinking if we should add repeater mode into the firmware as a default?)
@tbowmo said:
I would be interested in at least one of them. (I'm thinking if we should add repeater mode into the firmware as a default?)
Cool and I'll sign-up for 4 Gateway Devices ;) I'm dead serious!
In my 1st gen one-off IR Blaster, I found that I need to repeat some IR Signals if that is what you mean by "repeater mode". I am using the HA Controller to repeat after some delay but it would make more sense to integrate the repeating logic directly into the firmware. I am planning pretty extensive IR reliability testing with the IR Sensor Array that I mentioned and I hope that repeating won't be necessary but some environments may have sufficient "noise" to require repeating. Perhaps it should be configurable (number of repeats and delay)??
I'm also thinking that a single IR Blaster should be able to control multiple devices in a given room so I'm planning to provide that as out-of-the-box functionality in the firmware. I don't know how I will do that yet but something akin to an array of child-devices that contains the child device type, manufacturer and IR code. The MySensor's library limit is 255 child devices per node so that should be sufficient ;)
I also think it makes sense to "lift" the self-tests that you developed for the Micro Sensor (flash and crypto chip).
Finally, I would love your expert review of the design before I order some boards for verification. I owe you a review of the Gateway Device that I will complete this weekend now that I am back on my home turf.
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With the "repeater mode" I actually meant it to be a repeater for the mysensor network, so it double as both repeater and IR blaster.
Or maybe I would make a dimmer module, that could act as a repeater as well (I would add a couple of network repeaters around the house, as I have discovered some partially dead spots around here, where sensors are just on the edge of the reach of the RF signals)
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@ServiceXp said:
@blacey Really lovin this.. You plan to sell?
If there is enough community interest and demand, we (@hek et. al.) will offer the IR Blaster in the same fashion as @tbowmo's pioneering and very successful Sensebender Micro and hopefully in-development Gateway Device that I am personally jazzed about. Any proceeds from IR Blaster hardware sales will go directly to supporting the MySensors.org project (monthly hosting fees, etc.). So to answer that question we need to know who else would buy one if we make it available so we can estimate the batch size for an initial run. Anyone interested is encouraged to weigh in here.
@blacey i would buy 6 of these if they can reproduce my heatpump/hvac codes....
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I would be in for at least 3, probably 5!
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I also wants to buy 1-3 depending on price.
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I am interested allso.
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I'm in for at LEAST 1, but most likely ... MORE... :stuck_out_tongue:
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I'm in for a couple too...
