Saturday 6 December 2014

Xmas lights 2014

Well it's that time again when we all try to out do each other with flashy outdoor xmas lights. This being the first xmas in our new home I had to rethink how to put them up, and of course the wiring.
I'm still looking out for the best wire to use, I keep hoping to find thin green twin core wire, but alas I never find it to buy (appears all xmas light manufacturers know where to buy it!) so for now I'll stick to good old cat5 as it's not bad for the job, just the light grey colour isn't ideal as it's not noticeable.
The lights are my little xmas trees with lights in them, and a mini pir at their base. The idea being, feed power to the pir, take its output back to my Arduino and then control power to the lights on each tree.
The basic code is from my previous blog posts, and appears to work however I think somewhere between the rain last year, the house move and the pir being very cheap Chinese imports have decided to fair, or at least 3 out of 5 are now returning 2v on their signal line constantly instead of pulsing the 5v when motion is detected.
Tomorrow's task is to check them for short circuit, test their boards and try to fix them.
For now they're running my Arduino sequence.

Next jobs, use my multiplexer to provide more outputs from the Arduino and control even more mini trees and also maybe the other hanging lights strung around the windows and door