A Good House That CAN Do It All

In a really perfect good residence, the explosion of low-cost WiFi and Bluetooth chips has allowed a whole lot of small wi-fi gadgets to regulate the switches, lights, and every thing else required for a “good residence” at a comparatively low value. However what when you don’t need a whole lot of internet-connected gadgets in your house polluting the wi-fi spectrum and permitting potential safety holes into your community? In case you’re like [Lucas Teske], you would possibly attain for one thing wired and use cheap and (currently) available Raspberry Pi Picos to create PicoHome.

The distinctive twist of PicoHome is that it makes use of a CAN bus for communication. One in every of [Lucas’] targets was to make the boards simply swappable when {hardware} failed. This meant board-to-board communication and protocols like I2C had been prone to noise (each time a relay triggered, the bus would lock up briefly). The CAN bus is designed to work in an electrically noisy surroundings.

There are two components to the system: pico-relay and pico-input. The primary connects to a 16 relay board and may management 16 totally different 24v relays. The second has 16 optoisolators to learn from 12v-24v switches and numerous buttons all through the home. These might be positioned in an enormous steel field in a central wiring location and never fear about it.

The firmware and board files are all launched beneath an Apache 2.0 license, however the CAN2040 library this venture depends on is beneath GPL. We lined the CAN2040 library when it was first launched, and it’s pretty to see it getting used for one thing solely surprising.