The Open Light Project: Next Step

The goal of that project is to create cheap and efficient wireless devices to control professional lightning products, traditional analogical ones using a controlled Triac and DMX ones, by using a transceiver to DMX.

For the wireless part, the best option is using the zigbee, which is light, cheap, yet meshable.

The first step, here, is to test the designs exposed, then prototype it using the DIP designs showed in images here, and finally rebuild it using SMD components only. Once I’m sure things I’ve done works, It’ll be published.

The DMX Chapter

First step, let’s put a MAX485 and control a LED projector from an Arduino. To work it out, I wired up a MAX485” on a breadboard.

To talk to the board, I found out the DMXSimple project from tinker.it, which is pretty neat because the protocol has been implemented close to the assembly, and run by a timer so you won’t get timing issues.

But sadly, my first attempt has been unsuccessful…

For the time being, here is a first look at a possible implementation of the DMX to zigbee board. The overall cost of this design is about 30 euros without connectors and casing.

Image of schematic of Open Light DMX Image of layout of Open Light DMX

The TRIAC Chapter

And now, let’s have a look at the Triac schematic. I finally found out a really neat cheap and efficient design of a Triac on the Intertubes.

But I changed a few things from this design, first of all I want to change the old ATTiny2313 to the better ATTiny85 to control the triacs, and change the very (too?) simple alimentation to a more usual one.

Here is a first design attempt I built

Image of schematic of Open Light Triac Image of layout of Open Light Triac

And here is the first prototype. Once it’s built, I’ll write a code to test it.

Picture of the Open Light Triac prototype Picture of the Open Light Triac prototype (split up)

The XBee Chapter

I just found out about the XBee SMT, which is as cheap as €14.40, wih a µFL connector. I have worked on a footprint for eagle, and I found out the written package specification are inconsistent:

Inconsistent XBee SMT Package dimensions...

Thus, I used the given DXF file and imported it in eagle, but I have yet to verify it against the real chip once I’ll buy one.

XBee SMT Package

I’m going to put my own Eagle library on my github soon, including that package.