Smart Home
It is very simple to automate and control your home today.
There are light bulbs with integrated W-LAN.
Wireless speakers have been available for a long time.
Temperature sensors, controllers for the radiators, remote controlled shutters
and internet based IP cameras are standard today.
So are fridges which report their contents.
Generally this is referred to as the IoT - Internet of Things.
Our pointers and our receivers and our camera are an ideal extension of the
IoT - Internet of Things
Do you know what this is?
It is an Arduino, a small controller manufactured in millions of pcs. per year in China and sold for 2-5 USD.
There exist versions with integrated Bluetooth, BLE, and/or WLAN.
A lot of these so called "breakout boards" are available with any kind of sensor: rain, light, smog, temperature, etc.
and any kind of interface: relay, RS-232, RS-485, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, etc.
at a similar low price.
Place some wires and write a few lines of code and it works.
There is a website called "mcuoneclipse.com" made by Prof. Erich Styger who is working at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.
Whenever a new board appears he orders some and writes short and efficient articles how to use them with a few lines of code.
Thank you Erich for sharing all your projects!
Happy CIRCUITing Erich!
Now we let our China supplier put some of these devices and a set of our receivers and 3-4 pointers
into a retail box and a quick start guide with a weblink to more information.
We might also make a version with a camera inside.
By combining all of these boards one can easily automate their entire house.
Decades ago, we built model railways and automated the trains and controlled the signals etc.
We also made them individually controllable and by using PWM modulation made them start and stop smoothly.
Later we had even built small cameras into the trains.
Now this has changed:
People no more build model railways but rather automate their houses.
There are a lot of so called Arduino forums where they can post questions and get answers.
One guy asked how he can create a small electronic circuit which pops-up a windows on his smart phone whenever
a letter is inserted into the letter box.
And this hobbyist made this project work!
Give these guys our receivers and pointers and they will create a lot of home automation projects.
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