will start watching the other playlists very soon! haha

Thanks Tony! I've been working on it for the last few years. I got to the point where I ran out of breath going up stairs.

Even a cheap chinese step drill set will immediately get a better result than using a spade bit and deburring since you can use the front face of the next step to chamfer the hole a little.

Sounds cool, and if you're doing a retrofit it's sometimes necessary to use WiFi when running cable is too hard. But if possible: www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-58-wires-not-wifi-for-home-automation/

How did you solve power for the Wemos modules?

These kind of latching relays are often used in commercial battery powered heating controllers ... Schrack (Austria) make some excellent sub min ones in voltages as low as 3v! Ideal for even twin AA or AAA powered units. One pulse is all they require to change state!

The more government gets involved, the more you'll see stuff disappear. They don't want us making things.

+walperstyle wtf, lol

Part of the reason I was in China recently was to arrange custom switch manufacturing the will help solve that problem :-)

He was using Eagle this time.

Brooke is correct, I've mostly been using Eagle. In a couple of episodes I'm going to show the complete process of designing a product and taking it through to completed device.

It's easily set in the OpenHAB configuration, or whatever is being used as a rules engine. The buttons don't control anything directly, they only send event notifications to the controller, so it's up to the controller to determine "ok, button 34 has been pressed, so I'll toggle the state of the light in the stairs" using whatever configuration you specify. It's just as easy to have 1 button controlling a light, or 10 buttons controlling that same light. No extra wiring, no extra effort other than a couple of lines in the configuration. Or you can map it the other way: instead of having a many-to-one mapping like you've described, you can have a one-to-many mapping. For example, you could have lights around the house controlled individually, and also have a specific button in your bedroom that when you press it, every light in your house is turned off except the passage light, which is set to 10% brightness. Once you break free of the old-style direct control wiring, anything you want to do is simple changes in software.

Having a "night mode" where the brightness is decreased would be good, but I've found that having the switches glowing is actually very useful. They're not at full brightness, I have resistors to drop the current to only a few mA so the buttons just glow dimly. It's enough that you can find them in a dark room, but it doesn't light up the room or keep you awake.

@@Sci-fi-Si the cable is currently inside the walls and is difficult to change, I could fix it by creating a change in the software that detects the interference and ignores it, thank you very much for your help

Ive got mine running over 30m of cable with no interference causing issues. Depends what cables you have running parallel but really shouldnt be an issue unless youre doing insane runs.

I can't find them in Australia. I'm in China right now at the electronics markets meeting suppliers, and when I get back I'll be putting those light switch breakouts and matching buttons up on the SuperHouse online store.

No hurry, just investigating options, including some RGB switches.

The Problem is, that Most of Home Automationssystems do Not Communicate with another.. But For Example there is The sonoff-Touch

I was thinking about that, but the big problem is certification. For equipment to be permanently installed it needs C-Tick, FCC, etc (depending on the country) and obtaining that would cost too much. So I can sell parts and kits and boards (including assembled boards) for people to build their own things, but I can't sell devices for permanent installation as a retail-ready device.

Thanks for following for so long! Yes, the debate of centralised vs decentralised is a big one. There are definitely trade-offs in both ways. I've seen some extremely interesting work done by a friend of mine who spent years building a system that combined both approaches into a system that had virtualised logic services which could float around between different devices on the network, and be resilient against failure of different parts of the system. The software has been demonstrated to me and I've seen it work, but the company working on it never brought it to market. My friend has been working to get it released under an open source license so it may be possible to talk about it in more detail publicly at some point without being in breach of NDA! But coming back to the simple case, my personal experience has been that having a system that is simpler, more centralised, and prone to total failure is overall more reliable than a system that is more complex, decentralised, and prone to isolated failure. That sounds strange, but it comes down to probability. Distributing the logic means a higher number of complex devices, which means a shorter MTBF. So failures are less critical (perhaps isolated to one device, such as a light switch) but they are more frequent. Not only does it increase the number of failure events that you have to deal with, but the increased frequency leads to a dramatically worse perception of the reliability of the system for people living in the house. There's a whole interesting psychological phenomenon about the correlation between rate of failure, scale of failure, and perception of reliability that means it's much better to have big failures sometimes rather than small failures often. I want to do a video about it sometime, because I find it fascinating. But to get back to your question, yes, I have a UPS sitting in the bottom of the rack in my switchboard. In any blackout that's up to about 45 minutes, the controllers etc keep working just fine and everything is in the same state after the power comes back. If the blackout is longer and the UPS is exhausted, the OpenHAB controller does a cold start and runs a script that sets all devices to a known state.

Thanks for the response! Indeed I agree with you about is better to keep a simpler architecture rather than a distributed complex one. Also by reducing the number of complex devices keeps the cost down, since at higher complexity, higher price on the devices. My idea is to make a reliable DIY home automation system for my home and since in my neighbourhood the power outages are quite common, I was thinking that a UPS to keep going the OpenHab server and the router would do the trick for a quite long period (it would just supply power to the RasPi and the router, since is a bit silly to power the whole system -arduinos and so on- since without power for the lights, heaters and other devices they won't be useful at all) Anyway It would be very interesting a review on a decentralised approach just to have both points of view. Once again thanks for the response and for the full SuperHouse series, it solved me more than one doubt.

Excellent suggestion. I'd also add a small polyswitch on the 12V feed to provide some protection on that 12V line.

Hi Jonathan, great video! I agree with Tim, here in Germany we do not have much space on the walls. Usually our construction is based on bricks and the space we usually have is about 80x80 by 40mm depth. In my case I went for the traditional switches you presented in your video. Actually I replace them with some "switches" with a spring that works as a push buttons. Then, because of the lack of space, I used the traditional wiring up to the register box (which is close to the ceiling) and there I connected to my network. Then I lowered the ceiling and done. By sure could be done better, but worked for me.

You can achieve something similar if you put the sonoff about the light and connect the inputs to the light switch in a low voltage mode. Not being bigheaded but i prefer my implementation to his as it is completely fully functioning as a traditional switch when the network is down

I have Seen that Video (The sonoff basic with Switch Funktion) too, and tried it. Again same Problem , there is sadly no Space behind The Switches... My sonoff Touch arroved, now Infos to figure out how it‘l work with tasmota and Openhab or FHEM or iobroker...

That's a good solution. I showed something like that in one of my episodes about Sonoffs.

There's no internal pull-down resistor on the Arduino so you'd have to add one externally otherwise the pin would float when not pulled high by the switch. Having the switch active-low (as in the video) utilises the Arduino's internal pull-up and so when the switch is off, the input is pulled high rather than floating in an unknown state.

I've always wondered this. Won't the pull-up resistor cause a phantom current draw at all times? Instead, an active-high should only draw power when the button is pressed, isn't it? Do we do this because the internal pull-up resistor is such a high value, that the current can be considered to be practically zero? Does noise have anything to do with it? Do say ultra-low-power designs prefer pull-downs?

Danny T I was just building a thing similar to this and realised that using 12V as the HIGH is problematic, because Arduino is 5V. So I need a voltage divider for every input, plus a third resistor as a pull-down. Connecting to ground would be lot simpler and doesn’t have the 12V to 5V problem. I just had to do it that way because of my switch, and now use 5V instead of 12V so the lights are very dim...

Yes, exactly. Using pull-ups to bias inputs high, then pulling them to GND, is a very common approach for exactly this reason. It's also the way many communications buses work. For example, I2C uses 4.7K pull-ups (typically) and the bus is asserted by any device on it pulling the level to GND, and otherwise releasing it. That way any device on the shared bus can assert the bus.

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Hi Sean, it's great to see an 11 year old getting into this! It's a really interesting question that I hope I'll be able to address over the next few videos, where I'll be showing the process I use to design boards and take them through to production. Yes, you're right: I could make an integrated board. I do that for some projects, particularly once they go past the prototyping stage if I need to make many of them. However, there's a scaling problem where you have to trade off the one-off engineering effort / time against the optimisation of the final device. It's usually called "NRE", or Non-Recurring Engineering costs. You can spend a small amount of time (NRE) to make a device that's just a collection of modules or maybe a carrier board with an Arduino stuck on it, which is very quick and not much NRE but costs more to produce per unit. Or you can spend a lot of time/NRE to make a more integrated device that incorporates all the circuitry onto a single PCB, which takes much longer but is cheaper to produce per unit in quantity. To decide which way to go, you have to balance the savings in per-unit cost against the extra effort of designing an integrated board. If it takes an extra 2 days to design a fully integrated board that will be $5 cheaper to produce, it's definitely worth it if you'll be making thousands of them. But if you're only going to make a few of them for your own use, it's not worth spending 2 days to save $15.

Well, it looks like heavily RF susceptible. You may use shielded cat5 grounded properly, at a higher cost. I tested pretty standard cat 5 without shielding, a 30m cable, laying around my house, and works without an issue. Even mobile on top of the wire, wrapped around microwave etc. wouldn't drag it down. I think it's alright for a standard household, without extreme level RF interference, such as in an industrial environment.

I've used the TTP223 in a few projects, but for light switches I prefer something tactile. The general move towards touchscreens and touch sensors is a mistake in many situations: for example, I think it's stupid in cars where you need to be able to feel controls without looking at them. To me, light switches are the same. I want to reach it as I'm walking past while barely looking at it.

I can get them very cheaply direct from Chinese suppliers. I'm in China right now doing exactly that. After I get back I'll be putting up these breakout boards on the brand new SuperHouse online store.

This is deliberate, because I want the switches to glow constantly. There's no point only illuminating them while the button is pressed because your finger covers it anyway, so you can't see the illumination. Having the switches glowing turns out to be really good because you can walk into a dark room and easily find the switch. In a future version I'll have it showing output state by changing in some way, but I'll still want it illuminated all the time.

All sorts of stuff! Maker Faire Shenzhen, to start with, but that's just the warm-up. I'm going around the electronics markets, and visiting ITEAD, Seeed and a bunch of other places. There'll be plenty of video about it :-)

SuperHouseTV Sound like a lot of fun! Enjoy yourself and I look forward to the video's.

www.superhouse.tv/superhouse-vlog-58-wires-not-wifi-for-home-automation/

Why do you think it is devolved? You can still use the same light switch and slap it with your hand if you want to. It's not ideal with On/Off position of the switch in this case, but there is no other way if you are playing with home automation

Sergio L Watch how he turns on the light every time, it’s like he's cleaning his ear, he has to poke his finger inside the switch every time. He has to stop, look at the switch, aim his finger to get in the hole, then push inside the hole. This is nowhere near as fast and walking past and quickly swiping up or down at a switch. He seems to be amazing at coding and electronics, he could definitely make these work with regular switches, 3-way switches, or with dimmer switches.

Hi, why would it be better? Is it because you can use the already existing electrical wire instead of Ethernet, or are there more benefits?

charkandros, not sensitive to electrical noise and necessary for long distances.

I'd love to see what sort of switches are used in multimillion dollar homes. I'm not that rich! What type do you have in your house?

SuperHouseTV We use Lutron / Leviton products or regular light switches that have pushbuttons hidden under them