Wireless Smarthome Buttons

In the last couple of weeks getting ready to shoot my demo video and running multiple button pads for the first time as well as some significant firmware updates from the SparkCore team i’ve cleaned up the firmware code a lot. It’s almost a re-write actually.

• Updated SparkCore Core-firmware
• All configuration at top of the file
• Changed the way buttons work
• Added orientation options
• Topic strings now in variables rather than hard coded
• etc

The downside is that prior to the SparkCore “deep update” the micro would restart every 24 hours or so and then come good again now it just crashes, i’m obviously looking into fixing this.

My firmware includes some other open libraries.

The MQTT PubSubClient is based on Nicholas O'Leary's Arduino library and adapted to SparkCore by Chris Howard.

The library controlling the WS2812 LED's is based on the Adafruit NeoPixel Library by Phil Burgess adapted to SparkCore by Technobly aka BDub, PJRC and others.

The ClickButton library is from the list of SparkCore shared libraries, the original Arduino Library is by radon and i’m not sure who ported it to the SparkCore.

In the last couple of weeks Phillips has released the Hue Tap something their marketing blurb calls. “Here’s hue tap, the world's first wireless smart switch.”

The Hue Tap obviously only works with the Phillips Hue system of lights. But it feels like on some level it legitimises my project now that it has some “competition”

Hue Tap

• Zigbee wireless
• No Batteries or Power needed.
• No LED indicators
• Hue System only

Wireless SmartHomeButtons

• Wifi
• RGB LED Indicators and notification
• 5 Volt power needed
• Open System

I’ve got a friend working on a 3D printed enclosure. The design will be open sourced once it’s working well. My idea is to ship a Makers kit with the PCB and button pad to early adopters and those interested. Then you just need to add a SparkCore and print an enclosure.

It’s been a interesting collaboration working with a 3D designer, while the current case is simply a enclosure for my existing prototype, we have discussed a variety of major changes in the overall design for a better looking final product.

The eureka part of this project is putting the WS2812 LED’s behind the 2x2 button pad.

The idea for the project came when testing out my reflow oven with a Sparkfun Simon Says kit.

I realised the button pad would be a great user interface for controlling things and paired up with the the wifi devboard the (at the time) soon to be released SparkCore would be ideal. Then I was looking that the Simon Says and realised the SparkCore didn’t have enough pins to for 4 RGB lead’s and that’s when i discovered the WS2812 RGB LED’s.

Prototype version 1 had the button resistors on the back of the board, necessitating reflow of both sides. As i’d like to do a small batch of these at some point I redesigned the board bringing the button resistors to the front of the board.

There are pads on the back for the WS2812 power resistors but I’ve found that they are not really necessary the LED’s power is more of a star configuration than a chain and its’ only 4 LED’s

The other change from version 0.1 to 0.2 was learning to tent my vias to reduce the chances of a short near the button pad.

The reason for the shape of the current protypes is simply that there was large sections of unused board and i’d never made a non rectangular board before so it was more just testing out shapes than anything else. The next version of the board is going to go back to rectangular it’s easier to mount in a case and the spare area will be populated with space for optional extra sensors.