Re: Dr Johns Lights was Beginner at X10 - general questions

["Dr John Tankard" <jtankard@xxxxxxx>]

> Have you given more details on these units in the past?  One of
> my 'to-do's
> is hard-wired mains lighting control, preferably easily removable. 
Have
> you a successful design that you could share?  I would be able to
throw
> together the SSR type easily enough, but what do the singing and
dancing
> ones do?
>

They sing & Dance ;-)

No really, I have posted info in the past but its a long time ago, so here
is a quick run down. its subject to change with refinement. Each room has a
controller which handles the light level of either 4 or 8 channels, at the
moment the controller actually drives the triac's but I may distribute the
control of the triac to a smaller PIC part so that one chip is in each
channel but that is for later. This controller talks on a RS485 network to
other controllers for other rooms. Each controller has second RS485 network
which it talks to any input / output units (switches led's etc) (This bit
is
not complete), this means that a network failure would not prevent the
system working on its own. The controller's hold lots of preset scenes and
allow for soft start and cross fade, at the moment the fade is the sine
wave
divided up in degrees, this clearly does not provide a linear response for
three reasons, the power from a sine wave is nor linear, the light level
from a filament lamp is not linear and the most important one the eye's
retinal response is not linear, I plan to sort this with look up tables but
have not got round to it yet.

At the moment the project is on hold, I have decided to ditch the 485/422
networks in favour of a CAN system using the new chips from Microchip, to
do
this I need to get hold of the development system for it. Moving over to
CAN
will give some fantastic benefits, the most important of which is multi
master this means that a controller can directly hail another controller
without involving HomeVision, so I notice sounds outside at night and a
couple of presses on the switch by my bed can cause the outside lights to
come on. Ok there might not appear to be anything flash about this you
could
do it with x10 or the homevision, but it allows complete system control
from
any key station, if there is a defective controller, I can lock it out and
allow a different station to take over, it could even do it automatically.

The project is about 50% complete, in Jan last year my daughter arrived
(Sophie) so the along with building the house the lighting system has had
to
take a back seat. But I have nearly finished my new toy room er er Study so
things might start to move again, doing a project of this nature needs a
surprising amount desk real estate, computer 2 monitors, in circuit
emulator, bench power supply, lamps, prom blower, soldering iron,
oscilloscope, bench multimeter ...... the list goes on and with a one year
old into everything ..... does not bear thinking about.

Long term plan is if there is enough interest to supply some PCB's parts
list and pre-programmed PIC's for a small fee. But dont hold your breath,
my
wife says I have to finish the house first so that means the HomeVision
will
have to continue on driving SSR's for each lighting channel - hence the
Tilly Lamp ;-) The home vision unit is also running Win Amp on a PC which
as
all my CD's encoded into MP3 on a 30Gb hard drive all commanded by a
Pronto.
I have never programmed in perl before and I am waiting for a book on the
subject to arrive from Amazon on the subject so that I can also get to work
on mister house which looks really good, those on the list who are into
using Linux I can recommend it to you.


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