Wireless Relay

I bought one of these on ebay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320697857966&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

It works very well. I used the radio transmitter from about 80 feet away inside the house through multiple walls and it was successful. It has two modes, push and hold, push to toggle. The relays all have a NO and NC connection. The rf transmitter has 8 microswitches that shouldn't be any challenge to solder wires to.

This is the perfect solution for controlling those outdoor things that you
A) Don't want to trench and
B) Worry about lightening

I plan on using it to control irrigation valves that I added on to my system and already used up my one extra wire. I also figure to use it to automate my chicken coup. As soon as I get my automatic chicken coup door working and my "time to come home to roost" music. Also I can get it automatically refilling the water and maybe even dumping food. If I could get it to pick up the eggs and bring them in that would really be the bomb.

I so want to take a trip south to tour your rig, Lou.

Lou Apo said:

I bought one of these on ebay
...
The rf transmitter has 8 microswitches that shouldn't be any challenge to solder wires to.
...

Click to expand...

Can you expand on that a little? Do you mean that you could connect each of the transmitter's microswitches up to the contact side of a set of eight relays, then use those eight relays to control the relays on the receiver board? If so, that would be an alternative to the mirror relays I'm looking at (that cost about $300 for the pair of boards) to isolate my irrigation system.

Thanks,
Ira

Ira said:

Can you expand on that a little? Do you mean that you could connect each of the transmitter's microswitches up to the contact side of a set of eight relays, then use those eight relays to control the relays on the receiver board? If so, that would be an alternative to the mirror relays I'm looking at (that cost about $300 for the pair of boards) to isolate my irrigation system.

Thanks,
Ira

Click to expand...

Exactly.

I will be wiring the 8 microswitches to my elk relays just like I did with my garage door opener. I will put the jumper in the "push and hold" mode so whenever the elk relay is on, it will hold the rf relay on. You could call it a mirror relay. There is perhaps a couple tenths of a second latency on it, but I doubt there will be many applications where that would be a problem.

Of course in the "push and hold" mode you will want to replace the battery with a plug-in power supply. I haven't tested the max range on it, but based on my initial testing, it looks like at least an 80 foot range through walls.

That is a pretty cool product for very little money. I was going to build an Arduino version of this, but will have to rethink this now (major point for me being wasting ELK outputs vs ASCII control).

Thanks for the info Lou. Ordered one to play with. For my irrigation system, it would only need to go about 20', no walls, so it should be plenty good enough.

Too bad it can take up to a month to get here from HK.

Is there a way to marry the RF remote to the relay board so if you have more than one remote/board pair, they don't get in each other's way? Or are they married from the factory?

Are you doing anything to provide verification that the relay is working, or are you just gonna trust it? I guess you could use another one of these devices with the RF remote micro-switches hooked up to a set of relays controlled (in parallel) by the 24Vac going to the zone valves. If the zone was powered up, the associated relay would close, causing the RF remote microswitch to close, causing the associated mirror relay to close. If you had these "monitor" mirror relays hooked up to M1G zones, you could compare the zone state to the M1G relay state for the same zone to see if it is working properly. Or...if you never have more than one zone running at a time, and you have some way of detecting water flow, you could check to make sure you have flow when a valve is open.

Hope you guys got rain out of that storm that blew thru your area. Still waiting on it over here in the Houston area.

Regards,
Ira

What kind of enclosure do you have in mind for outdoor use?

If your sprinkler manifold is right next to your house is there still a concern about isolating the relays from the security controller? What lightning problems have your guys seen/heard?

I also had plans on putting a contact on my shed doors that would run through about 10' of buried conduit - any concerns there?

Ira said:

Thanks for the info Lou. Ordered one to play with. For my irrigation system, it would only need to go about 20', no walls, so it should be plenty good enough.

Too bad it can take up to a month to get here from HK.

Is there a way to marry the RF remote to the relay board so if you have more than one remote/board pair, they don't get in each other's way? Or are they married from the factory?

Are you doing anything to provide verification that the relay is working, or are you just gonna trust it? I guess you could use another one of these devices with the RF remote micro-switches hooked up to a set of relays controlled (in parallel) by the 24Vac going to the zone valves. If the zone was powered up, the associated relay would close, causing the RF remote microswitch to close, causing the associated mirror relay to close. If you had these "monitor" mirror relays hooked up to M1G zones, you could compare the zone state to the M1G relay state for the same zone to see if it is working properly. Or...if you never have more than one zone running at a time, and you have some way of detecting water flow, you could check to make sure you have flow when a valve is open.

Hope you guys got rain out of that storm that blew thru your area. Still waiting on it over here in the Houston area.

Regards,
Ira

Click to expand...

I paid for the device June 9 and it arrived June 21, so not too bad on the shipping time.

I had the same concern about unique ID's regarding remote to relay comm. I emailed them about that last night and, in very broken English, this was the answer, "Hi, there is a IC and jumper pads on both remote and receiver. If you need different ID, you need to solder the same jumper to pair. You can check that you have."

The unit is at home right now so I am going to have to look at it to see if I can figure out what they are talking about. I did ask a follow up question about how many unique id's were possible. I am waiting for the reply.

I am not going to put any monitoring check on the actual operation except to do, God forbid, a manual inspection for the first week or two. If I have no failures, I will just trust it. It won't be the end of the world if it fails. I don't trust it enough to use the toggle mode since if it fails to shut off, that could be a problem.

I was going to put in an plastic weather proof jbox. HD and Lowe's have ones for about $10 that are plenty big enough. I am using one of them presently for one of my Leviton surge supressors (one of my panels is outside) and it works.

And, yes we got a descent amount of rain. 1.5 inches at my house. Finally!! It's probably raining right now in Houston.

If your sprinkler manifold is right next to the house and the wires go straight in such that only a couple feet of wire is outside, I think your risk is low, especially if you keep all of your wires in conduit and keep your valve box dry and clean. But, there is still a risk. As far as 10 feet to your shed, keep the wire in conduit and hope that you don't have any direct strikes. With contacts I think you run a greater risk than with relays, becuase there is some electrical separation with relays from your main board, but with the zone contacts, those feed right into the security board so induced potential on the wires isn't even going to have to arc at all to get in.

EDIT: I was playing with my new phone trying to get you tube uploads to work. So, here it is, a link to my first ever you tube video demonstrating the relay. You won't be terribly surprised if it doesn't work of course.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83zD0ENIn8Q&feature=player_detailpage

I think I figured out what they were talking about. There are 8 paris of pads on the back side of the PCB where the IC is soldered on. I believe you can jumper various combos of those to create different frequencies. This appears to be like the dip switches on the old garage door openers, but without the dip switches.

So no jumper is like 0, jumper is 1. So you have an 8 bit combination or 256 possible frequencies.

I would be hesitant to use these for sprinkler control. It will only take one missed off signal to have a run away sprinkler zone!

BraveSirRobbin said:

I would be hesitant to use these for sprinkler control. It will only take one missed off signal to have a run away sprinkler zone!

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it has a push and hold mode so that cant happen. it could happen in the toggle mode. watch the youtube video i made and you can see the difference after i changed the jumper

I'm definitely curious how well it holds up a signal - especially for a 15-20 minute run time... if it loses signal for a moment, will it bounce the valve off and on?

Other than battery drain, I don't see any reason why extended periods of transmission should make a difference. I plan on putting it on an external power supply so battery drain won't be an issue. The only other issue, of course, is being close enough that the signal range isn't borderline.

I bought a second one of these and now need to jumper the rf chip to change the frequency. The Chinese dude who sold it to me only has a vague idea on how to do that so I was hoping someone here might know for sure.

The chip is mounted to the pcb with one row of the contact pins projecting through the board and out the bottom where they are not connected (electrically) to anything. On either side of those pins are two rows soldering pads. Would you jumper the pin to both pads on either side of any given pin (matching that of course on the transmitter)? Or do you just jump one side?



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It also occured to me, that if instead of harwiring the jumper on the transmitter, you run it through an elk relay, you can use one remote to power hundreds of relays. But staying simple, if you just jumpered one of the rf locations through an elk relay, then you could change the frequency of the transmitter by turning on/off that relay, so 9 elk relays would be able to control 16 rf relays. 10 elk relays could control 32 rf relays, 11 control 64, and so forth.