As usual, I am here after a long period of time without completion of my project. During my time away from my little projects, it occurred to me that I might have a problem with the way that I was doing this project. I had a workable solution, bread-boarded part of it and connected the raspberry pi to it, putting a simple python program onto it and exercising the 8-channel relay. After checking things out, I started putting the elements together and soldering them to a perma-proto board from Adafruit. Sure enough, when I started soldering the 24 pin chips onto a breadboard I ended up smoking them. I found myself completely unable to switch the 8-channel relay at this point.
At this point I started rethinking my approach to development. Even though I had plenty of Raspberry Pis to go around, I started thinking about other solutions. In my network, I have a vlan specific to Experimenting. I also have a bunch of switches that allow me to setup links all over the house. It occurred to me that maybe I could use an ESP8266 NodeMCU chip to receive commands and cause the switching to occur. That way, I could use a Raspberry Pi to do the commands. I could also simply print each of the boxes and tailor them to my circuitry. So that is where I am at.
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
