My house has two decks, and the lower deck has a staircase with about 20 stairs. In the wintertime, they get all snowy, and so my parents asked me to make a deck lighting system for them. They were hoping for a set of leds underneath each stair's edge, to provide accent lighting without actually being visible and giving off glare. Hopefully they won't read this page until I'm done, otherwise the suprise would be ruined. As with all my projects, however, take that with a grain of salt: statistically speaking, there is no way I'm going to get even 50% done this project. Time will tell.
Yesterday, I was at rp electronics, having a browse, checking out the wares, and one little goodie that caught my attention was a home security vibration sensor. I'm not lame, I've made "vibration sensors" before, but this one came at an interesting time. A friend of mine noticed that the top of the stairs runs right past a "data conduit": that is, a pipe being used to transport camera 1's signal and power. The conduit, he noted, was in a perfect place to mount an ethernet node, and have controllable lighting on the deck. You see, one problem I have with a dirt-simple home automation setup is its laughable sense of integration: timer lights, for example. How can you set light timers to vary their patterns based on the season? Or the weather? How can you get your doorbell to MSN you instead when you've got your volume turned up? How can you get your phone to ring silently in the middle of the night? Automatically? Obviously a kid isn't going to standardize home automation across every system in a house, but baby steps can be taken. Instead of hard-wiring a switch into the kitchen to turn the deck stairs' lights on and off, or a two- or three-switch setup, why not get their control computerized? That robs you of the inflexibility of a normal setup. The obvious downside is that you can no longer consider them as reliable as your doorbell or telephone, but as I said, baby steps.
So the idea is to hook an ethernet node onto a multiplexer, and a vibration sensor per stair. Obviously at this point you could do some pointless dazzling effects, but that's not the point. Imagine the light fading on as you stepped on a stair, and slowly following underneath you as you walk down.
Jason Miller - 2007-02-08 18:35:19
Hi there! I must say, this is one of the only personal homepages I have come accross that has valuable content! I think the idea you are toying with in this article could be something really neat, and I think there are a few ways you can make it easier (and therefore more possible) to complete. First, you could use microcontrollers as opposed to ethernet and so on. That way, you can use Pulse Width Modulation to acheive the gradient glow effect you seek. Also, consider that the user of the steps will likely wish to see their path lit up ahead of time. This could be done using a glow effect spanning 3 steps instead of only one. Just thoughts! Thanks for a great read. -Jason
Andrew Fuller - 2007-02-08 20:09:57
Yep, that's the idea: microcontroller PWM's an output line to get fading or flickering or what-have-you. The difference is that the microcontroller is connected to an enc28j60 ethernet chip over spi. You set this little guy up with its own IP address (or make a dhcp routine), and then you can go to a computer and type "./stairs -on all", which sends a udp packet to 192.168.1.16, we'll say, the enc28j60 catches that, gives it to the microcontroller, and the microcontroller fades the stair lights on. The entire board could also be powered by power-over-ethernet, which means it would simply act as a gateway: its input is an rj45 jack, and its output is a bunch of cmos-level GPIOs (or GPIO->ethernet for eg. a weather station).