The wand detects when it's being moved around and sends a message to the power bar, which toggles the according outlet (here the "raised" state toggles the lamp on/off).
The wand is an embbeded system composed of :
- an Arduino Nano that controls everything,
- an accelerometer and gyro (MPU 6050),
- a RF 433MHz emitter,
- a 9V battery,
- a LED,
- some magical stuff because it's a magic wand.
Here is an view of the electronic inside the wand :
Once initialized (which takes about .8s), the wand continually checks its position. If it detects being raised, lowered, swung left or right, it sends a message to the power bar.
The Receiver is a 4 outlets power bar. On top of the traditional wiring for AC, it also includes :
- An Arduino Uno,
- A RF433MHz receiver,
- 4 250V relays
Below is the electronic diagram :
Each relay is connected as follows :
- Common incoming live wire on C (Common),
- Separate outgoing live wire to the outlet on NC (Normaly Closed)
The project was made using Platform.io.
If you are using it too, just open the two folders emitter and receiver in VSCode, and everything will be done automagically.
If using the Arduino IDE, you will first need to install the VirtualWire library.
Then, open the two src subfolders in the IDE and you will be able to compile/upload.
Code and schematics are MIT.
Thx to Tockn for the MPU6050 library. His lib included in this project is slightly tweaked to be faster during initialization, but kudos to him.
And thx to Harry for the idea.