Sorry, this is still in the half baked pile and I am just starting to put together a plan, but would like to solicit some feedback on direction.
objective: put a sensor on wife’s beloved heated matress pad and have the ability to check the status and send out an alert if it is not on by a specific time. Yes this a first world problem...NO interest in being able to turn it on from afar. Having the gas fireplace valve being able to be turned on from anywhere makes me nervous enough (i have a wall switch the turns off that ability...) so really I just need to be able to have an ON or OFF signal coming into a pin of a micro. The rest of the project I have enough snippets and ideas, I just need some help on how to do the sensing. I'll likely use an ESP8266 and MQTT, or direct to IFTTT. The software part I can readily do.
I thought about a temp sensor tucked under the pad. That seemed interesting, but would rather not. So I think I would like to tap into the leads just to be more complicated for me.
My first thought was to used a simple 5A ACS712 module. That would provide a decent voltage to an ADC. Add a little logic, easy. So that is a possibility that I have done that style before. It would be a simple deal to cut one of the leads to stick in the sensor module. One nice thing nere is that I would not have to worry about common grounds (i have a long standing childhood failure because of that....)
Then I wondered that since I don’t care about the current, only that there is some, is there a more creative and compact way to do it?
Taking a look at the circuit, it is fed by a 16 VDC brick. It has a little PIC IC, and a pot for the output adjustment. I would think would be a PWM system? I should have snapped a couple pictures when I had it apart earlier, rookie move.
Can anyone, based on that sparse info, give some thoughts around some ways to be able to sense that it has been turned on that I could investigate? Mild to wild is fine.
It has a simple standard tactile button for the on-off. There is an LED that signals it is on. I thought about tapping into that circuit and reading the voltage across it.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts, sorry for lack of details at this point. I’ll add more as this morphs into something.
objective: put a sensor on wife’s beloved heated matress pad and have the ability to check the status and send out an alert if it is not on by a specific time. Yes this a first world problem...NO interest in being able to turn it on from afar. Having the gas fireplace valve being able to be turned on from anywhere makes me nervous enough (i have a wall switch the turns off that ability...) so really I just need to be able to have an ON or OFF signal coming into a pin of a micro. The rest of the project I have enough snippets and ideas, I just need some help on how to do the sensing. I'll likely use an ESP8266 and MQTT, or direct to IFTTT. The software part I can readily do.
I thought about a temp sensor tucked under the pad. That seemed interesting, but would rather not. So I think I would like to tap into the leads just to be more complicated for me.
My first thought was to used a simple 5A ACS712 module. That would provide a decent voltage to an ADC. Add a little logic, easy. So that is a possibility that I have done that style before. It would be a simple deal to cut one of the leads to stick in the sensor module. One nice thing nere is that I would not have to worry about common grounds (i have a long standing childhood failure because of that....)
Then I wondered that since I don’t care about the current, only that there is some, is there a more creative and compact way to do it?
Taking a look at the circuit, it is fed by a 16 VDC brick. It has a little PIC IC, and a pot for the output adjustment. I would think would be a PWM system? I should have snapped a couple pictures when I had it apart earlier, rookie move.
Can anyone, based on that sparse info, give some thoughts around some ways to be able to sense that it has been turned on that I could investigate? Mild to wild is fine.
It has a simple standard tactile button for the on-off. There is an LED that signals it is on. I thought about tapping into that circuit and reading the voltage across it.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts, sorry for lack of details at this point. I’ll add more as this morphs into something.