Automating a Villa with an Arduino
For the past year on the side in my free time I have been working on building what will eventually be a small Villa at my parents house. This project is an exploration of carpentry and all that goes into building a house. A few pictures follow:
Into this project I plan on doing something interesting. I thought it would be interesting to be able to control the house from my phone. I was originally going to use a Rasberry PI board to accomplish this, but due to availability issues I ended up using a Arduino Uno R3 instead:
The Arduino will be the "computer" driving the house. It will talk to the outside world, and decide what circuits should be turned on and off. Unfortunately I can't just jam 10 amps of 110AC into this bored without potentially starting a myriad of forest fires. In order to control the circuits I need a way to control larger AC voltages with smaller DC voltages.
Relays are a great way to accomplish this. At first I was looking at mechanical relays, but these had two issues. One is that they are noisy. I don't want to hear clicking noises every time a circuit turns off and on. The other problem is the ones I looked at were on at low voltage. This is undesirable if the system fails in some way as it would mean lights and other services would be stuck on.
To address this I ended up going with an 8-channel solid state relay. These are quiet and the particular model I looked at was off at low voltage. You can see it working below:
I have a temperature/humidity sensor on the way. This will provide me with data to be able to figure out whether heating or cooling circuits should be activated. I also have an Ethernet shield on the way which will allow me to plug this board into my home network.
Communicating with my Phone
The idea is that I can forward and route a public port on my router directly to the UNO. I can then develop a phone application to communicate on this public port. With this system I should be able to turn lights on and off, and adjust temperatures all from my phone, while sitting on the couch.
Wall Mounted Color Touch Screen
I also plan on eventually using a color touch screen that will sit in the wall, and allow users to set temperature schedules and turn circuits on and off. (http://imall.iteadstudio.com/im120417020.html) The TFT touch screen I am looking at has a physical mounting issue, but this is easily alleviated with pin header extenders (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004G56J8W).
I was hoping to spend more time working close to the hardware on firmware, but the ADK is too convenient. I'm still trying to figure out a good reason to do some kernel work.
Ethernet Shield: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006UT97FE
Temprature Sensor: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0066YD3GM
Tomato Potato,
Josh