Home Automation Domotica Forum Europe, Bwired Forum

Hey guys, I'm in the final year of my engineering and have taken up a project on Home Automation. I would appreciate any kind of help there is to offer i was reading through this forum and it is like a gold mine of Home Automation, you guys are like pros, hehehe...
well anywayz, as i said, my project is basic home auomation, in which i would like to include automated lighting, based on ambient light or motion sensors and the heating based os temprature sensors, the problem is, the university won't let me use the mains, so have to scale down to a 12v busline. This means i will have to simulate most of the things and i am sorta clueless of how i should be going about it... i have a brief knowledge about programming and am comfortable with electronics....
please guys, help this poor soul out...

x10/xanura/marmitek/a10 whatever, all rely on 1 thing. Using normal power, cant you make a demo model which uses the mains? Basicly your telling us you want to do a project on fishes, without water. Maybe someone else knows, but then again i would think your re-inventing the wheel if you use 12v. You can always use some converter from 220 to 12v perhaps?

// Erik (binkey.nl)

As snelvuur says, regular home automation depends on using regular power.

If you still want to do a "12V demo" you will either have to build everything from scratch or use a normal PLC-based system used for industrial automation.
The drawback with both these approaches is that they won't have anything to do with home automation...

What I would recommend you to do is to make a design of what you want to have on a plywood sheet or something else, route the 230V using regular extension-cables on that, so that you don't make any own connections to that, and add your automation gear on that.
I would guess that this would make the university a bit more confident in letting you play with it.

(To be *really* safe, plug it in with a plug-in earth-leak detector.)

//Markus

If you want to help the open community wile doing your project you can yoin us at http://www.vscp.org We need more hands and brains...