wraggster
December 16th, 2012, 20:25
http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/raspberry-pi-controlled-dimmer.jpg?w=480&h=270
[Stephen] took the safe route when getting his Raspberry Pi to dim an AC light bulb (http://www.philippinestuffs.com/raspberrypi-sunrise-alarm/). He didn’t roll his own outlet box with a mains-rated relay inside, going with a mechanical connection instead of electrical. By attaching a servo motor to the dimmer knob the RPi can adjust the light level without risk of electric shock.
He is using the ServoBlaster package (https://github.com/richardghirst/PiBits/tree/master/ServoBlaster) to drive the servo motor with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. That’s all fine and good by itself, but he went the extra mile and designed a few different levels of functionality around the pairing. The motivation behind the hack was to build a sunrise clock that had a lot of power when it comes to luminosity. But he also plied the RPi’s networking features to serve up a web-based control. It has a slider to set the light level, as well as breath (like a slow fade) and flash features.
The servo is a bit noisy when moving quickly, but the sunrise alarm takes 30 minutes so the gears don’t really make any noise at all. Check it out in the clip after the break.
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/14/raspberry-pi-used-to-automate-a-dimmable-light-bulb/
[Stephen] took the safe route when getting his Raspberry Pi to dim an AC light bulb (http://www.philippinestuffs.com/raspberrypi-sunrise-alarm/). He didn’t roll his own outlet box with a mains-rated relay inside, going with a mechanical connection instead of electrical. By attaching a servo motor to the dimmer knob the RPi can adjust the light level without risk of electric shock.
He is using the ServoBlaster package (https://github.com/richardghirst/PiBits/tree/master/ServoBlaster) to drive the servo motor with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. That’s all fine and good by itself, but he went the extra mile and designed a few different levels of functionality around the pairing. The motivation behind the hack was to build a sunrise clock that had a lot of power when it comes to luminosity. But he also plied the RPi’s networking features to serve up a web-based control. It has a slider to set the light level, as well as breath (like a slow fade) and flash features.
The servo is a bit noisy when moving quickly, but the sunrise alarm takes 30 minutes so the gears don’t really make any noise at all. Check it out in the clip after the break.
http://hackaday.com/2012/12/14/raspberry-pi-used-to-automate-a-dimmable-light-bulb/