Home Easy kit going cheap at B&Q

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derek
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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Joined: 26 Oct 2009

I happened to be wandering around my local B&Q and noticed that the entire Home Easy range of stuff had been heavily discounted (like a £50 item reduced to £8). Looks like the line is being dropped. Perhaps worth checking your local store ...

BodgeIT
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London, United Kingdom
Joined: 10 Jun 2010
I checked out mine, couldn't

I checked out mine, couldn't see a discount on retrofit plugs but the 109, 2 gang sockets were going for £10, that's 4 sockets for £20 (btter value than the retro fit modules) unfortunately they don't work with the HAH.  I was sure they'd work if they worked with the other remotes.  I was going to buy one of those rose fitting units for my main light, now I think I'll leave it.

derek
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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
HE109 2-gang sockets

>I was sure they'd work if they worked with the other remotes.

Surprised that these don't work with the HAH. If you have the BBSB style Mega8 firmware onboard, i'd have thought that these would train up like any other HE device & 'just work'.

Update. Just tried a 109W unit. It doesn't work with the BBSB HAH firmware! Neither does it work with a BBSB handheld remote. I'm going to have to decode the RF pulsetrain from the HE handheld remote and compare against the BBSB remote to see exactly what is going on here.

I will get this sorted (as I now have several 109 units).

BoxingOrange
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United Kingdom
Joined: 11 Jun 2010
So the BIG question

So the BIG question,  

Do we all go and buy some at the giveaway price?  I'll go and find a B&Q tomorrow if I can grab a bargin, just don't tell HWMBO, she's no idea about my plans to turn of all the lights at the press of a button :)

BodgeIT
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London, United Kingdom
Joined: 10 Jun 2010
Wait till she finds out you

Wait till she finds out you can shut off power to the washing machine so that you can hear the radio when the football's on!  That may give you more of an insight into my household than yours ;-)

BoxingOrange
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United Kingdom
Joined: 11 Jun 2010
Washing Machine

Funny you should mention the washing machine....

She'd like to have it on a timer, so I was thinking of using an BBSB RF plug and Google cal. to let her do that!  More brownie points :)

Just a though, I wonder if I can get the plugboard to create a Google cal. event from an SMS or Tweet?  I think that's the rest of my spare time taken up this week.

derek
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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
A cunning plan

Brett had a very good idea a while back. Rather than have the RF Tx piece hardcoded to a specific protocol, we might roll some HAH and AVR code to allow a definition of the entire Tx message via xAP. This is pretty involved, because messages have different bit encoding lengths, inter burst gaps, bit timings, bit patterns and number of repetitions. Some nasty BBSB group operations even use trinary logic with a sneaky 'half length' on bit.

However, it should be doable. 

We've been working hard on RF reception ... Brett has alpha code for the HAH and I have alpha hardware/firmware. 

Perhaps arbitrary RF Tx should be next on the list?

derek
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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
HE RF Protocol

Just 'scoped out the pulsetrain from an HE300 handheld transmitter. This successfully operates the 109 double sockets.

It's very different from the BBSB format. Notes: Inter-burst gap is 10mS. There is a 'start of message' signal of around 280uS high, followed by 2700uS low. Then the datastream comes along. A zero bit seems to be 280uS hi, then 280uS low. A one bit seems to be 280uS hi then 1300uS low.

Entire message looks to be 32 bits long.

Gotta grab more & compare different on/off combos before I'll know what bits do what.

derek
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Glasgow, United Kingdom
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
We have control

Finally got around to hacking the HE109 protocol. Have it running reliably on my development environment.

Now that it's cracked, I need to work on seeing how best to retrofit this capability into the HAH.

Derek.

BodgeIT
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London, United Kingdom
Joined: 10 Jun 2010
Great Job Derek!

This will tidy up my TV setup and free up a couple RF units for elsewhere.

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