ioBridge Xmas Lights

[nathanknz]

'tis the season!

I have just put my Internet Controllable Xmas Lights online.

Using an ioBridge that sends serial data to an Arduino which then turns into as many digital outputs as you desire.

The lights are in a small section of my garden, and can be controlled via http://www.pacificlights.co.nz/en/2009/telecontrol

A little hard to see the lights during the day, much better in the evening.

Enjoy!

[iobridge]

A great way to celebrate the holidays - Controlling Christmas lights at somebody's place in New Zealand!

How do you interface with the lights?

[nathanknz]

I connected one of the digital outputs on the ioBridge to the RX in on the Arduino. The Arduino takes the serial commands and interprets into a channel and an action. On the native Arduino there are 18 outputs (this is when you use the analogue inputs as digital outputs). The action can be other off (0), on (1) or invert (2).

If you wanted more than 18 outputs, you could extend the Arduino using shift registers giving you as many outputs as you desire.

The digital outputs from the Arduino drive an array of relays using a very simple relay driver circuit (1k resistor and a 2N2222 transistor, plus a 1k resistor and a indicator LED).

I chose not to use the ioBridge native widgets, and used the API instead. Nothing against ioBridge's widgets (infact I think they are brilliant), I just wanted to log all the actions that occur in my own database - perhaps logging could be a feature request for the ioBridge guys, but that's for another day!