Some time ago, I started documenting my project to automatically switch on/off some external lighting on the house. You can read the full rationale behind the project in this post. I’ve been delayed in getting this posted because I’ve had other personal projects that have been a higher priority lately.

Today, I’m posting the (nearly) final code for the entire project. All you need to play with this is a WWVB receiver, an Arduino, the TimeLord library, and an optional LED. The LED would be attached to the ssrPin output (with a current limiting resistor) to give an indication of whether the lights would be on or off. Initially, the output defaults to having the lights on. This is so that a power outage in the middle of the night will default to the on state until the system receives a valid time from the WWVB receiver. The LED that’s built into the Arduino is not used for this because I used it in another part of the code to indicate the stability of the received signal. That LED should turn on/off at a rate of once per second if the received signal is clean and free of errors.

There are probably a few bugs in the code at this point, but my testing has shown it to be fairly reliable – enough so that I’m going to be working on a project enclosure as well as some modifications to the electrical in the garage to put this project to good use. I think this code demonstrates a wide range of the capabilities of the arduino. There is some use of the default libraries as well as some custom programming that utilizes the atmega168 hardware directly.

I don’t think I’ll draw the ire of the Arduino haters on this one, but you never know. Personally, I think the flexibility of the platform is something that most of ‘haters’ don’t understand. You don’t have to use any of the libraries if you don’t want to and you can pretty much just skip forward to writing straight C for the mega168 if that’s what you want to do. Personally, I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to use a development platform with those capabilities; especially when you can avoid spending extra time and money on creating custom boards.

If you want more details and explanations of the code, please read my prior posts.

Source: sun_switch