Greetings,
This week our team helped other teams with their capstone projects. The one we were working on was the Condominium lights with the green button, we tried to use this button to control the lights through an ESP8266 programmed to toggle, but we were having issues with flickering we eventually figured out the reason why and we are going to fix it next week.
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| Button layout, it is a Form C |
The ESP8266 we are using is from NodeMCU. It operates at 4.5V-10v usb powered. It has WiFi and IO capabilities.
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| ESP8266 from NodeMCU |
By utilizing a toggle code, we can effectively toggle the lights without a toggle button allowing us to press the button once to turn on all relays for the lights and again to turn off all relays for the lights. The LED lights were working with are 36 VDC.
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| The code we used to toggle relays |
Initially the group that was working on the lights programmed the toggle wrong, so we had to fix up their code. Once the code was working more issues popped up and the main issue was that the lights would flicker non stop, we thought it was the wires so we changed them out and tried new wires, it worked for a while and started flickering again. Then we thought it was the raceway because there were too many wires so we tried running the wire outside of the raceway, the lights still flickered. Then we thought it was the button so we took it off, and tried it but everything worked fine. Finally when we were testing it, we realized that when the ESP8266 was away from the wall, everything worked fine and when it was brought close to the wall it started to flicker. This was because there were 24 VAC wires running all over that wall, the AC voltage was affecting the board which made it flicker. Therefore to fix this problem, all we have to do is move the controller elsewhere that does not have AC wires.
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