It’s always nice to see hackers pick up stuff headed for the landfill and put it back in action with a quick repair and upgrade. [Septillion] found a wireless remote controlled AC outlet in the junk bin and decided to do just that. A nice spin-off of such hacks is that we end up learning a lot about how things work.
His initial tests showed that the AC outlet and its remote could be revived, so he set about exploring its guts. These remote AC outlets consist of an encoder chip on the remote and a corresponding decoder chip on the outlet, working at 433MHz. Since the various brands in use have a slightly different logic, it needed some rework to make them compatible. The transmit remote was a quick fix – changing the DIP switch selected address bits from being pulled low to high and swapping the On and Off buttons to make it compatible with the other outlets.
Working on the AC outlet requires far more care and safety. The 230V AC is dropped down using a series capacitor, so the circuit is “hot” to touch. Working on it when it is powered up requires extreme caution. A quick fix would have been to make the changes to the address bits and the On/Off buttons to reflect the changes already made in the remote transmitter. Instead, he breadboarded a small circuit around the PIC12F629 microcontroller to take care of the data and address control. Besides, he wanted to be able to manually switch the AC outlet. The relay control from the decoder was routed via the microcontroller. This allowed either the decoder or the local manual switch from controlling the relay. Adding the PIC also allowed him to program in a few additional modes of operation, including one which doubled the number of outlets he could switch with one remote.
I was always wondering what was the power supply in these. Now I know. Thanks HaD !
Microchip has a nice appnote on these “capacitive” type power supplies: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/AppNotes/00954A.pdf
Thanks!
Reading the title, did anyone besides me hope to see a power sent to a plug socket wirelessly?
Yeah, i really cannot think of a way to call this wireless, it obviously does not work without being connected to power.
I thought “wireless AC power” was a stupid description.
I think that the suitable description is : Remote Control AC Power Socket Outlet Switch.
Photo shows what is inside the socket. This acts the electric currency “ON-OFF” using a remote control.
The set is shown here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-X-WIRELESS-REMOTE-CONTROL-SOCKETS-SWITCH-HOME-MAINS-UK-PLUG-AC-POWER-OUTLET-/181957499395?var=&hash=item2a5d831a03:m:mcVPsK2H_K8Xs02Fxz_0mWQ
Nope, I immediately understood without any such silly jumps into metaphysical science-fiction of some sort
I added the second part of the line not to be nasty but because I thought the term metaphysical science-fiction was a nice invention of me. And I’m sure I can use it more than once too, like for instance to describe various TV shows they produce lately.
Mind you – strictly speaking most radios are AC wireless outlets, of music and talk :)
Now he needs to send the signals from a computer or raspi2 to make it into a computer controlled or IoT type of setup.
Nice info..