My Project - A Beginners travel….
To be honest. I underestimated this.
My goal was: to built a system that can react to PIRs and turn lamps on and out.
My parents have a large garden which is really dark in the night. No light till now.
My plan was to built two Mysensor-Stations that have multiple PIRs attached. And multiple 12V LED.
Those lights should be turned on according to motion detected by the PIR. But the whole system should be able to be controlled by a central server and Frontend. E.g. a garden party and you don’t want the lights to go on or using all the pirs as a alarm station react on motion, turn on all lights, blinking, and sending a message to my mobile phone.
I decided to buy a raspberry and add Pimatic as a webfrontend to control everything.
I built my serial device for mysensor in a box to control wireless sockets….
This is running since a year and my lights in the livingroom are automatically turned on and off according to sunrise and sunset. Nice. First goal.
I had issues with new versions of pimatic and the mysensors lib, but I could work it out.
Then I started to built a wireless motion sensor in a PIR of Ikea. (MOLGAN)
I had to learn what a LDR is, read about current dividers and so on… Hard topics for a beginner.
Then I started with the system for my parents.
I started to built a station with 2 PIRS, 2 Relays to control a different 12V LED-Supply and some temperature sensors.
But I realized that all this soldering with wires takes too much time or is not that nice. So somebody told me make your own PCB.
So I learned EAGLE and built my first PCB. I sent it to a PCB-Maker and Tataaa. There they are:
I built the PCBs in a way, I could divide them for smaller applications. The most important for me was the easy to built Arduino-Radio-Section. It has the most connections. The rest is easy.
So I’m using this PCB now for all things. Even for little wireless temperature sensors.
For the PIR-Relay-Temp-Stations I used NTBA-Cases that I found.
They are quite nice. And cheap.
So at the end I had two individual PIR-Relay-Stations. And everything is controlled with Pimatic by rules.
Even my worker desk changed. My wife gave me a nice Soldering Station for a present and within one year my arsenal of electronic pieces grew…
My current project is a battery-powered Temp-Sensor.
Again I’m using a part of the cutted PCB.
But I#m having problems with the radio. This little friend is 50m away from the main station.
And it is not connecting.
My questions:
- What is a good orientation for the radio part? Vertical ---- or horicontal: | Antenna |
- How is repeating working? Do I just activate one sensor in between as a repeater and wait?
- IS there any order of adding a new sensor? Kind of binding sequence? First have it near the main station? Or is a binding also possible through a repeater?
Thank you!
