RE: Interesting Concept... or complete idiocy?

["Kevin Wood" <kevin_wood@xxxxxxx>]

>Have you looked into building one of these??  Any ideas of approx cost?

I'd like to build something along these lines. The economy would come in when you start to consider the possibility of switching more than 1 channel using a single PIC and receiver circuit. If you program the device and / or house codes into the PIC when you blow it (not too much of a restriction) you can use all the remaining IO pins to drive more channels. If you build a 4 channel or even 8 channel module then it becomes much cheaper than a consumer unit full of LD11's, where you duplicate the circuit for each channel.

 

Furthermore, a PIC such as the 16F84 (a couple of quid) has flash memory which could be used to memorise preset dim levels, the last state of the device at power down and so on.

 

I just need to find the time to have a play now...

 

I don't think processing the analogue signal to recover the 120KHz carrier inside a PIC is a goer, though. You'd need a lot of processing power to implement a digital filter which would be as effective as a tuned LC circuit. However, there are certainly improvements which could be made over most commercial X10 receivers.

 

Kevin

 

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