Category: Lighting

BaanRimNaam gets light

I’m still getting caught up on the posts I didn’t get to over the New Year’s weekend. I mentioned in my last post that we moved into BaanRimNaam, but I forgot to mention that we got the lights up and running. We haven’t yet mounted any solar panels onto the roof, but when we ran…


BaanMae indoor lighting finally finished

With all the other things going on, we’d been too distracted to finish the DC solar powered lighting in BaanMae. So while staying there, we had be reliant on plug-in AC lamps. Except in the main room and bathroom where we had been working on prototypes.  Once we were happy with the prototypes, we sent…


First “smart light” deployed on the walkway

This has been ready for testing for a few weeks now, but I’ve been quite busy. But I finally sat down and tested out the walkway “smart light” post we built. It is working quite well. Here is a picture as it was getting dark: Actually it started raining right about then, so this was…


Motion sensors don’t like acrylic/plexiglass

I thought the walkway lights were ready to install. On the test bench, everything worked fine. But every time we assembled the lights, the motion sensors stopped reacting to motion. For the past few days, we assumed something was getting screwed up in the sensitivity tuning of the PIR sensor. But pommm pondered on Monday…


Successful first test of “smart lights”

Having built up and tested the peer-to-peer RS485 network protocol, it was only a matter of coding for a few days to write up the firmware for these “smart lights”. Here is a quick video capture of an early test: The 3 lights on the desk are the top part of the lamp posts. They…


Very successful first peer-to-peer protocol test

I’ve coded up a simple test of the peer-to-peer protocol I’ve been discussing recently. Here is a picture of the set-up: For this test, I have 3 light posts transmitting short 10byte packets as fast as they possibly can given the constraints of the protocol. These constraints basically reduce to: You can’t send a packet…


Please stop interrupting me (more analysis of AVR interrupts)

I have recently been working on designing a peer-to-peer RS485 network protocol with collision avoidance (and maybe even collision detection) for the walkway lights on the land. (Link to last two posts: here and here.) As mentioned in my last post, even though each device is doing its best to detect if another device is…


Building a simple but efficient peer-to-peer RS485 network protocol

In my last post, I mentioned that I am working on a peer-to-peer network protocol for the RS485 network that I am using to communicate between my “smart walkway lights”. In today’s post, I will continue with a general outline of the approach I plan to take. This is all very nerdy, so if you…


Walkway lights, network protocols, masters, and slaves

It has been a bit quieter than usual on this blog recently. It isn’t that we haven’t been up to much. Quite the contrary, it has been very busy. But much of the business (busy-ness) has been either at work. And the land work has mostly just been putting finishing touches on projects that have…


Walkway light posts prototype mounting done

The workers welded a steel mold for the base of the walkway lights. Here is our prototype mounted up: The test was to see how stable it is. It is quite stable. If you really try to push it over, it tips… but this is probably a good thing. The metal is not very strong,…