Hi Jon and all,
I am about to order all spare parts to assemble light switch and automation controller which Jon reviewed in his amazing videos.
As he is probably very busy with his projects and has thousands of emails, it is not very easy to ask him directly, does anybody know:
What kind of shield is Jon using in his Home Automation controller today? In his latest video it is different from what he was using a year ago. He mentioned that he is not using 8-Channel Relay Driver Shield anymore, what might be the reason for this? There might be something new, which does not require soldering out pull-up resistors.
For the light switch controller, I/O Breakout To RJ45 are out of stock, are there anything to replace? Or if Jon reading this - do you expect them in stock?
Hi l have a fire door on a magnetic door keeper and have just brought laivolo (VL-C701B) doorbell switch. This switch will only create the circuit when the switch is pressed. Is this switch programmable so when the switch is pressed it brakes the circuit. How would you go about doing this. This is a stand alone switch at the moment I wish to replace all my light switch to this make and run them all through a mqtt server at a later date.
@Jim9112 There is some question as to whether this switch is a Tuya setup or not. If it is in fact Tuya, it can more than likely be reprogrammed to Tasmota and the switch inverted through software. But that will require someone with experience with that switch. I would suggest dropping into the Tasmota channel on the Superhouse Discord server and asking there if anyone has knowledge of this thing.
You can click on the Discord tab at the top of this page for information and the invite to get into Discord. BTW, welcome to the forum!
Hi @Serg, sorry about the super slow reply. I only noticed this topic when it got bumped up by the other post being added onto it.
Right now I have 2 different controller setups in the 2 automation switchboards. The East switchboard has 3 x 8-channel relay driver shields stacked on an EtherTen:
That’s been working for many years and is generally reliable, but I’ve found that if multiple shields are stacked it can cause connection problems because the pins on the stacking headers are thinner than normal pins. Sometimes (maybe about every year or so) it stops behaving and I have to wriggle the shields to make the connection good again.
If I used the big side-by-side Relay Shield Carrier that I designed for another forum member, I don’t think I would have that problem:
The West switchboard used to have almost the same system, but with an EtherMega and 4 x relay shields. However, I had more connection problems with those shields and the Mega has heaps of I/O, so I wanted to experiment with direct I/O control just to see how it would turn out. I pulled out all the relay shields and directly wired a bunch of 4-way relay driver modules and it’s been so rock-solid reliable that I haven’t touched it since:
This is partly what drove me to coming up with the I/O Breakout header format, because I wanted to be able to connect modules like that without all the individual wiring:
If I was doing that switchboard now, I would either use a Relay Shield Carrier with 4 Relay Shields, or an I/O Breakout Shield Mega with 4 of the I/O Relay Driver Modules: