Wireless indoor lighting, sort-of
If you've been to Sweden on different times of the year, you quickly notice that the amount of sunlight varies between 5 hours to 20 hours. Hence, in the winter, you want the lights on quite a bit,To avoid adjusting the light timers to account for the dusk/dawn moving about 15 minutes per week in spring and autumn, I've wireless:d a lot of the lighting with the help of a Raspberry Pi 2 Moveld B, a 2.8" touchscreen, a Tellstick Duo and a ok-ish Java program called NexaHome. I've mainly used Nexa and Proove switches and relays. The latter are cheaper and works just as well. The Proove switches' relays give a good "thunk" when switching on or off and that actually feels safer than something quiet and tiny, especially when you're dealing with mains voltage.
The setup works pretty well and the wireless 433 MHz signal reaches 15 m to our storehouse where we have some christmas lights hooked up. NexaHome has a web server so I spent a few minutes crafting a special webpage to fit the RaspBerry's touchscreen. Thus, one can control the lights by not having a smartphone. I like that, but I also like being able to shut off the lights from bed if I went to sleep a bit earlier.
The main issue I had with the setup once I got it up and running was that I couldn't get the touch screen and the HDMI output to work at the same time. I think it's just a limitation of how the driver was written at the time. (Maybe it has changed now). It'd been nice to use it as a media player or some such, but with Netflix, Spotify and Viaplay via Chromecast, we're pretty well set and I haven't missed it. Nowadays I don't have time to consume as much media, so the few series/movies I watch I can pay for. (Not like back in college where I had watched ~140 Naruto episodes in a month or two.)
The NexaHome software isn't the best nor greatest, but it has worked for me over a year or two, so I've actually donated a bit. The commercial alternative was SwitchKing, but I felt the price at the time (250 SEK, ~25€) was a bit too much since what I had at no-cost worked. I noticed that the price has recently dropped as the authors have put the project into support-mode, so it may be worth taking a look again. However, having worked with real industrial PLC:s the recent year, I'd much prefer something of that sort now.
Anyway, the Pi will probably serve it's duty as a home (lighting) automation center for a few years to come. The 433 MHz RF system is nice and good value-for-money, even though it misses a light or two sometimes (even on repeat, but rarely more than a few times per month),
We'll see what happens when or if new requirements are needed.
Next post will be about my (scrapped) first plan for the house's sun blinders ... and maybe hint of what duty that Arduino will actually end up doing...
TTFN.
