The number of “Smart” bulbs and switches that are available out in the market is nearing infinity these days. These devices generally tend to cost a considerable amount of money, and for the price what you generally get is a device that can probably be controlled over bluetooth or WiFi from your Phones and smartwatches. All this spending however, doesn’t make any sense for a maker or a DIY enthusiast as all this can be achieved with some really cheap electronics components which are widely available.
Most of these smart lighting solutions and switches have two major hardware requirements- A Relay and a Microcontroller. What if you have an ARTIK board lying around and want to implement this smart switching on it? The ARTIK boards come with a wide range of connectivity options which include WiFi and Bluetooth making them ideal for this project. Philippe Coval of the Samsung Open Source Group, who understands this technicalities has come up with a complete guide on making a smart switch that can be controlled via a smartphone which happens to be the tizen based Samsung Z1 in this case and the Gear S2 smartwatch.
For the demo, Phil uses the beefy ARTIK 10 IoT module however, since this isn’t a resource intensive task, you can even go with the ARTIK 5 or the ARTIK 7 board. Phil loads up the ARTIK 10 with the Tizen 3.0 Common OS and sets it up to run IoTivity server. You can find the necessary firmware for the Artik 10 over here. Uncompress the system image to an SD card and insert it into the ARTIK board. The board boots up with ARTIK and IoTivity server.
You can find the rest of the process at-
- https://blogs.s-osg.org/boot-tizen-artik
- https://blogs.s-osg.org/introduction-tizen-development-artik/
Software aside, a thing to remember when using the relays is to use the one with the right rating (5A for common equipments and 20-30A for heavy load devices).
