This board is open to co-op purchase until FEB 28th 2007!

http://picdimmer.17.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=77

(http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=21&m=61194)
This circuit can ONLY be used for dimming lights. Inductive loads cannot be used. This includes electric motors and fluorescent lamp ballasts. The reason is that the reverse EMF produced by inductive loads produces an out-of-phase wave back to the triac so that the triac never sees zero volts. Thus the triac never ceases conducting, resulting in total loss of control. There are snubber circuits that can be added to filter this reverse EMF and restore order to the triac.

As with all circuits that use 120 volt AC mains, the circuit should properly fused for the loads to be used. Due care must be taken when working AC Mains voltage to protect from shock and injury. Never work on the circuit with Mains voltage applied to the circuit. Do not bring Mains voltage onto a breadboard. It is too easy to forget where on the breadboard these voltages are.

You can put the AC side of the circuit on a perfboard or prototype board and bring the logic level signals to/from a breadboard. Just remember to use adequately sized wire in the AC side for the anticipated current.

There was no formal analysis of this design done in either the analog or digital domain. It is not guaranteed to work for the expressed purpose. No warranty is expressed or implied. This was a hobby project that I simply wished to share, at cost, with others at no profit to myself. In short, I take no responsibility for personal injury, injury to property or any other damage or injury related to the prototyping or use of this circuit. Proceed at your own informed risk. Electricity can kill you. This circuit can burn down your house and then kill you, or maybe in the other order too!

Please keep in mind that this circuit was designed with 120VAC 60Hz in mind. Other voltages and frequencies were not considered. However, if you do try to explode, I mean use, one of these boards under strange and new conditions; I would be interested in knowing the result of the experiment. (Please include projectile velocity in your report).

Step 2 : Introduction

First and foremost I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not the expert on these topics. Dozens of people have contributed to the creation of this document; first and foremost Phil Short should be attributed with most of the wisdom! Secondly Sean Bowf and tfmacz from picdimmer.17.forumer.com provided a great deal of patient technical support. I am simply a messenger who would like to see a clear document that contains the information all in one place to save poor Phil (And now myself) the stress of answering the same questions 100’s of times! I also believe altruistically that this contribution will help push the technology to higher limits. By building a cook-book for these steps, I hope someone else will invest hundreds of hours and use this design as a starting point, to take it to the next level!

If you find errors in this document email: jaunemaillot AT gmail d o t com

Step 3 : The 16 Channel Renard Pic Dimmed SSR Design

This picture is intentionally small, so I don’t have to update it constantly as the design changes. A PDF of this layout (updated as necessary) can be found here for detailed review. The PDF is the most viewable version, you can zoom in nicely.

http://www.ritzfam.com/ChristmasMadness/Renardx16SSR/Release

Step 4 : A picture of the 7” x 3” Compact Layout

Step 5 : Why SSRs on board? Why 16 Channels?

In my case, all of my lights will be in neatly spaced discrete groups. I will have 16 mini-trees located very close together. I will have 16 “greeting candles” in the front window (Small single bulbs that look like candles), and the lights on the front of my house will break up nicely into two clean groups of 16. In addition, 16 channels are perfect for the lights on the roof. I like the idea of a 16 channel SSR onboard because essentially I will only need 5 AC extension cords. One cord will run from the power mains to each enclosure and I wont need to build 36 SSR boxes for outside use. In addition I will purchase SPT-1 from actionlighting.com (500 feet of 16 gauge wire for $55) to run from the screw down connectors on this SSR board out to the lights, using snap on plugs designed for outdoor use. This in my opinion is a very low cost, clean solution to my lighting criteria. Having said that: this may not be the right solution for everyone. Certainly one downside of this approach is that you may not be able to upgrade your controller from year-to-year as new improvements are made. What I mean by that is that since you have invested $60 in the controller (with SSR’s) you are “stuck” with this design. Naturally the board is very flexible and a lot of changes can be made, and the pic firmware can be changed as well… But I’m just providing you with “full disclosure”.

Two things that I view as a disadvantage of the “controller separate from the SSR” designs are as follows:
1) You need to run AC power to all of the SSR boxes. That is a lot of green extension cords! There are several interesting designs to handle this (The most recent being the strip board being discussed on computerchristmas.com). I do understand that this is the route many folks have gone, and it is not a bad method, and depending of the layout of your yard it may even be better. I’m only suggesting in my case this design is more efficient. I also don’t like the idea of putting low votage circuitry “under” live 120 volt receptacles, and worrying about water getting into SSR boxes outside.

2) You need to run CAT5 to each SSR from the controller. For a 64 channel design, with the SSR’s averaging 50 feet from the controller, that is 800 feet of Cat 5! With this design, you chain the controllers serially. Lets assume 100 foot spacing of the controllers, you would need 400 feet of Cat 5. But more importantly you only need to make 4 cables instead of 16.

The ramifications of this design are: Cheaper deployment of lights out to farther distances from the controller. RS485 is good up to a kilometer, and you would only need a single cat 5 cable to run that distance… I just want to restate, Olsen 595, and Renard controllers are not a bad design, they work great. But in my case, this design better meets my needs. The Olsen and Renard designs with external SSR’s would be ideal when the distance from the controller to the SSR’s is not too far, or if the spacing between lights was very large.