Help with a project. Expanded ideas - Arduino.
Hello Rezer,
Hey thanks for the reply. I have seen those X-10 devices, they sound interesting.
As for my first message for help. The remote outlet gizmo is just a very basic idea, a feet in the water kind of thing. Sort of like when I built my first MAME cabinet inside my Space Gun arcade game (
**broken link removed**), it just lead to more stuff down the road. The outlet gizmo came about because I have one I bought for my 84 year old mother's house, but we never used. I'm going to hack something together over the weekend, but it is really the tip of iceberg as to where I want to go.
About 2 years back I did a lot of looking at the Arduino units, but never took the plunge. However, the ideas I wish to work on now are perfect for that unit and I am pretty sure that some to the "products" which are sold by dealers today for big dollars ($1000 - $5000+) may very well be based on the Arduino since it is off the shelf stuff.
I would love to find some folks knowledgeable enough to help with my prototypes. There are several directions that I want to go, but I want to start simple.
Again, I am not going to say the purpose of the device in an open forum, but I can discuss it more in private email or PMs.
Going down this more complex road, I have some basic questions about the possibility of certain hardware working for my purposes. With this in mind the basic layout of the first idea is basically as follows.
In the remote scenario, the Arduino is at the receiver end of the chain.
This device
http://rentron.com/Linx/HHLR.htm is the transmitter end of the chain. The Linx CMD-HHLR-433 "Long-Range" RF Transmitter requires this receiver
http://www.rentron.com/remote_control/RXLC-434LR.htm and this decoder
http://www.rentron.com/remote_control/Holtek.htm#648
So my first big question is can the Arduino be interfaced to this transmitter and receiver combo? Also of note is that I do not need the range listed for this transmitter, which is '1000. I would never be that far from the receiver, so perhaps there are other units like this on that would also work. This transmitter just happens to look nearly identical to a unit sold by dealers in my market, for the purpose I am working towards.
Back at the receiver end, one possible use would have all the electronics in a package about the size of a deck of playing cards. It will have some sort of LCD display, which needs to only be one line of data, with 8-10 characters, able to display alpha and numeric characters.
The Arduino would have some programming code that will parse the button presses from the remote into the required data stream and send it to the display.
This is a very basic blueprint for the device. There are many other possible options and configurations, but this is the first one I'd like to work on.
Can anyone comment on interfacing the Arduino to the above mentioned transmitter and receiver?
Thanks and I look forward to discussing this further.
-David