Electronics projects and kits – Page 5 – Stuff I design and build and take apart

Philips adds new models to LivingColors product line.

In a clever plan to keep their customers permanently slightly confused, Philips has added new models to their LivingColors product line. The boxes and lamps are virtually the same, the remote is different. Both versions are labeled as “Generation 2”

The new buzzword is “smartlink“.

According to the manuals, both the old ( 69143 ) and the new version ( 69171 ) of the Gen 2 lamps use IEEE 802.15.4.

So now we have the “Generation 1” which does not work with the “Generation 2”, and there is the “Generation 2 smartlink“. Gen 1 and Gen 2 will not work with each other and i’m pretty confused about mixing “Gen 2” with and without “smartlink“.

The original LivingColors was pretty over engineered of what it did and it gave me the impression that Philips had bigger plans for these lamps. Apparently they do now with smartlink, but the original LivingColors was more of a prototype.

smartlink is interesting and promising. Philips was one of the founders of the Zigbee name and concept and they used some of the concepts and protocols of Zigbee for the smartlink enabled LivingAmbiance lamps.

For now, I’m stuck with two incompatible lamps.

Paperbacks of recent english books.

I read a lot of english books and was excited to see Niel Stephensons new book :

Reamde at Amazon UK.

Niel Stephenson is know for books like Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle (Baroque Cycle 1) and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (or via Amazon.de : Snow Crash
, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle: 1 (P.S.) and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer ).

It is really annoying they only have a hardcover edition though. Hardcover is a reason for me not to buy a book. I live in the Netherlands and I can just as well buy from Amazon Germany and there they do have the paperback english version of Reamde.

The paperback version from Germany is more expensive (14.95 EUR) than the hardcover from the UK (9.49 GBP = 11.0352 EUR now). However, for the Dutch, Luxemburg and Belgian customers shipping is free for books from Amazon Germany so the net result is still a pretty good deal.

The paperback from BOL is, as usual, way more expensive (20.99 EUR !) and has a 1.95 EUR shipping fee.

ITead Studio Foca and RDM360-UART

Just in from China :

The ITead Studio Foca V2.1 USB to serial converter and the ITead Studio RDM360-UART 125kHz RFID tag reader.

Together with the female connector wires from DealExtreme you can quickly build a test setup and read 125kHz RFID tags.

One complication : The datasheet for the ITead Studio Foca V2.1 is WRONG !

The incorrect connection diagram of the ITead Studio FT232RL board..

The wiring diagram does not correspond with the board. The correct pinout is on the rear of the board, the wires goes on top. Strange and clumsy.

The rear of the actual ITead Studio FT232RL board.

With the correct pinout the setup works like a charm.

Serial Arduino and CC2500

Recently I built a one-off serial Arduino with a CC2500 for someone wanting to control a couple of LivingColors and through an external system.

This is what Patrice has built with it. It seems like a big setup (compared to most Arduino projects) and I’m pleased it works.

Control Living Colors by Beckhoff SPS

Nice setup !

The serial Arduino is useful if you want to control LivingColors lamps from a system without USB.

IR-Toy and DX RGB lamp

DealExtreme has a couple of IR controlled RGB led lamps available (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ) with GU10 or E27 connector. Kees, the unstoppable tinkerer, loaned me one of these (I’m assuming it is this one) to play with. Aldi Netherlands has them as well.

Dangerous prototypes has has a toy called “IR Toy” that can record and playback IR Remote signals.

To control the lamp the IR you first have to record the signals of the remote. For WinLIRC the procedure is described here. In my case I first had to upgrade the firmware of the IR Toy to 09a.

The DX RGB lamp is well built with a metal housing and neat PCB and seems hackable.