Touch switch - to each lamp
It so happened that my wife and I bought lamps to put on the bedside tables near the bed. And the lights were good for everyone, except for one thing - the switch they had was only on the cord, and to turn it off or on it would have to climb the nightstand in search of this switch. Therefore, I decided to modernize the lamps, but it wasn’t there - my wife forbade me to drill them, they say you spoil the appearance, they cost money! Well, of course I understand her, after my experiments on remodeling a chandelier ... but here the story is not about that.
Then I decided that it was necessary to put touch switches in the luminaires - there was no need to drill holes for them, and it was simple - I really liked the idea of turning on the light with a touch.
Since there is no radio amateur from me, I decided to buy a touch switch ready and hide it in the base of the lamp. I googled a little and found a company that sells various touch switches that are installed in ordinary mounting boxes and control the light of the chandelier. First I wanted to buy a conventional touch switch - like this , disassemble it and use only the circuit from it, but then it turned out that they had separately on sale the sensor modules themselves, at a very good price - 80 UAH per on / off and 85 UAH per dimmer (that's about $ 10). For the test, I ordered two different modules, one just on / off, the second with a dimmer function - smoothly controlling the brightness of the light.
Two days later, I took the modules in the courier service office and got to work.
In the box was the touch switch module itself, a small advertisement, and instructions for connecting.
Connection is very simple, the touch switch must be connected to the open circuit of the lamp power supply, for this there are two terminals on it, and the lamp housing, which will act as a sensor, can be connected to the middle pin with a wire. You can connect an LED to the extreme two pins, as I understand it, it will glow when the lamp is off, but I did not use this opportunity, since I had nowhere to insert this LED.
After I disassembled the lamp, it turned out that almost the entire place in the base was occupied by a heavy plastic “pancake”, which was needed so that the lamp was heavy and stable. To place a touch switch in the lamp, I decided to cut a place for it in this “pancake”. As the autopsy showed, the “pancake” was filled with something similar to cement, to cut it I used an angle grinder (grinder) with a cutting disc.
After I successfully cut out a piece of “pancake”, I assembled the lamp, connected the wires to the terminals of the switch, connected a separate wire from the sensor to the lamp housing - I just clamped it under the nut that holds the “pancake”. All connections, including unused contacts for the LED, were insulated using heat shrink.
And then I thought, and just in case, I rolled the entire switch module into shrinkage of large diameter.
Here is a video that shows what I ended up with:
With a short touch of the lamp housing, the light turns on and off, and if you touch it with your hand and hold it, you can adjust the brightness of the light (it works only with incandescent lamps, you cannot use "economical" bulbs with a dimmer). The switch is able to remember the brightness of the light, that is, turning off the lamp at minimum brightness, it will turn on at the same minimum brightness. There are several nuances in using such a “touch” lamp - firstly, the switch will work only with one position of the plug in the socket. If he does not respond to touch - you just need to turn the plug over on the other side. Secondly - if you put the lamp on the floor, or a metal table - it may not work, or vice versa there will be false positives. When using the lamp on a wooden table or bedside table there are no problems.