COOLRF: Recent History. Part one



    I began to be interested in “smart home” for quite some time. At one time I tried to be a dealer of one of the manufacturers. He took part in a specialized exhibition. Communicated with a bunch of people. Everyone wants, everyone is interested. As a result, not a single sale from exhibition communication happened. In general, there were no queues from those who wanted to. The manufacturer required the purchase of regular, not small volumes. I decided not to risk it and curtailed this cooperation. Having lost as a result several tens of thousands of rubles of invested money.

    Time passed. On the shelf was a box with unsold modules. Happening urges to install them in your apartment always ended with reading the documentation. In some places I would have to redo the wiring, in some places arrange some tricky somersaults with wires. My perfectionist thinking could not stand it and the box continued to remain in its place not empty.

    After each such file, I began to search the Internet for replacement options. Something simple, not expensive and affordable to buy. And every search necessarily ended in failure. This is not to say that it was precisely those setbacks that led to the start of COOLRF. Then I did not think at all about the development of electronics. A series of accidents helped the project begin.

    Soviet past


    I must say that I have been very far from electronics all these years. As a child, I had three development paths - my grandfather’s “soldering iron”, my father’s “camera” and “computer”. At the disposal of my schoolchild were a complete set of soldering accessories (I personally have a couple of soldering irons, various parts, printed circuit boards, etc.) and a complete set of a young photographer (two cameras - “Zorkiy” and “FED”, an enlarger, a gloss , a little less than a ton of photo paper with complete chemistry living in the refrigerator, a red flashlight for development activities and a decent bunch of trays, which later were used with pleasure by different generations of family cats).

    In the sixth grade, I went to a special electronics group. There we soldered a bit, set some interesting memorable experiments (such as creating a radio from potatoes) and played a lot on the local computer. For several minutes, one after another in strict order. This was before the mass appearance of television set-top boxes. It was a ZX-Spectrum. And 1991 is in the yard.

    In the seventh grade, I got my own personal ZX-Spectrum in the form of a Yekaterinburg clone with the mysterious name “Magik-05”. Soldering irons quickly moved to the pantry, the photo equipment for many years remained in a large box under the bed. I began to become (and became) a programmer. My hands no longer touched the soldering iron.

    Chinese Arduino


    In 2012, the Internet more and more often began to surface here and there, a new unusual word. "Arduino." Having missed all this a couple of times, five times past my ears, I became interested in the details. And I was very surprised how much the progress was made. The soldering iron is no longer needed, you can program in ordinary C, in a simple and understandable environment. The components necessary for a home-made smart home are not expensive and miniature. "We must take it."

    In the fall of 2012, I first made a purchase in China. Ordered Arduino Nano, a dual relay module, two low-cost NRF24L01 + radio transmitters and a USB to TTL adapter based on the PL2303HX. My “ingenious” plan for conquering the world involved the use of an adapter for connecting a radio module to a computer, for controlling a relay through an arduino with the same radio module connected. Cheap, cheerful, innovative.

    Naturally, the world was not conquered in an instant. The adapter outputs a serial port, and the radio module is controlled by SPI. Of course, I read about this much later, already twisting in my hands the devices received after two months of waiting. My next order was for the Chinese New Year, I just waited for it not really long.

    Local public


    In order not to be bored much, at the beginning of 2013, I bought something necessary in local stores, namely: a translucent plastic cup for the switch, a “crown” battery, a connector for it and a Legrand button switch. Some of those purchases were later “lit up” at the project’s hubs.

    The first solution was supposed to be this: in the switch box we close the line, making the lamp constantly energized, put the arduino + radio module + battery in the empty place of the box behind the switch, connect the conclusions of the switch to the arduino. At the base of the ceiling lamp we put Arduino + radio module + relay + miniature power supply 220volt.

    In mid-February 2013, at a popular forum in Yekaterinburg, I created a topic about experiments with a smart home based on ready-made Chinese solutions. In general, the people liked the initiative, the advantages began to appear under the posts, it became clear that many wanted to have something like that. Inexpensive and expandable.

    In parallel with this, I read, read, and read again. The construction of the crown, arduino and the radio module did not quite fit into the space allotted for the switch. It turned out that an ordinary battery-powered arduino does not last very long, and a collective farm with the replacement of a built-in voltage regulator will be needed. In general, it would also be difficult to pack this hodgepodge into some kind of complete box solution, and loose everything did not look perfect enough for me.

    I began to realize that the standard arduino in my endeavor to “get off” did not work. And I obviously didn’t draw on non-standard solutions either with knowledge or financially. So it seemed to me then. Arduinka was put into a drawer, a topic on a local resource was abandoned.

    ... To be continued ...

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