If you could find the right contacts on the board that the remote triggers your could(are there up and down switches on the board or wired into it?). If your remote didn’t work is there anyway to manually trigger the unit if so you could tap in there.
I always look for the simplest way that can cause the least amount of headache. The remote it easy to tie into and already works plus it you some how mess something up my guess is the remote is cheaper to replace then the control board.
I have ordered that photon board, I’m hoping I can get it wired to the board and integrate with ST. Cant seem to find a replacement for the remote or actual control unit. Honestly don’t know much about boards and hoping I don’t mess the full thing up.
Would I be wiring the photon to the pins on the underside of the board to the RF receiver chip or under one of the black relays?
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
23
Honestly… I feel that if your bed remote is using standard simple 433Mhz (or 315Mhz) codes, I highly recommend going with wireless transmitter modules (~$10-$15) for Arduino/Photon) rather than touching those relays in the bed hardware. Sure, the latter is a nice direct approach, but it is dealing with higher voltages and the risk of damage.
By using the RF cloning option (i.e., the solution we discussed) you avoid having to touch any of the bed hardware and that keeps it safe from damage (and also keeps valid warranty, if applicable.
I read about the broadlink RM Pro on the forums, Seems like a great little solution but nobody has got it working through smartthings. Any way to simply get this photon board wired up with an transceiver and get it to learn the command and then send it out?
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
26
“Simple” is relative. Anyone with an average amount of Arduino experience won’t have any problem with the basic hardware and RF code configuration.
As for the Photon Cloud and SmartThings config, @keithcroshaw solved and shared that part.
Now just depends if you want to get your hands dirty or find a local wizkid…
just to re-add why i think the approach i am taking would be the best and least destructive method. my method will involve replacing the existing remote board from UR1 and wiring the Photon into that socket. that will allow for the remotes board to be retained and swapped in/out as necessary as the remotes board is removable and this means we will not be damaging the existing remote or receiver in any way to get this working.
obviously this is dependent on the voltage that the existing remote board runs on. im presuming it will either be 12v or 5v. obviously 5v would be the preferred voltage as we would not have to introduce a circuit to step down the voltage to correctly power the photon,
I have been able to remove the RF receiver connected into U! it now as considerable more options and confirms that its 433mhz. I’m a Muppet, as I though it was soldered on, Literally just pulls off. Would you be happy to take a look at this close up to see if this means anything to you?
ok that looks good. i honestly think the Photon would be relatively simple here the only problem i can see looking again at the relays are that the are 24v DC relays, which makes me think that the remote board is also powered at 24v DC, if you could confim that the output of the VCC pin is 24v DC
if so then we would need this to step down the voltage to 5v for the photon and then the output to the relays would also need to be 24v so we would require the VCC to be bridged to the pin via a transistor which we would trigger from the the photon, effectively using a transistor as a switch as outlined here this circuit would need to created on a breadboard (which you have in that kit)
i am unsure how confident you are with electronics? it would be an intermediate project but not too difficult to do as each relay would be triggered by an identical transistor the issue i have is i cannot locate the datasheet for those relays ZJ3F-CNH-24VDC to find out what the coil resistance is so you would need to look at the nearest equivalent which from my reckoning is a G5LE-1 24DC and the coil resistance on that is 1.44k so as per that article a BC337 might me the best selection but you would need to confim the voltage and current on the VCC pin to be sure. also check the voltage on the VT Pin
I personally would still would tackle this via the method i have proposed however if someone else has another simpler idea that is non destructive and requires less knowledge of electronics please pitch in. but the deciding factor for you @darrenflanagan is if you look at the pic of my latest photon project and go aaaaargh then maybe this is not for you!
ok but looking at that you would need something like the CC1101 board but that bumps up the price quite a lot to investigate if it is even feasible. there is a discussion on the particle community regarding some options, however i have no direct experience of doing this so could not assist further
Yup this just needs a 12v power supply. Then wire it into the pins for the relay that you can see now that you removed the RF board.
Since this has relays built in no voltage issues to worry about. You just have to figure out how the RF board is triggering the relays: with ground, VSS or might even be the VT.