Diner Light

The prototype Diner Light is up for Christmas. Using the touch sensor from the previous post to give independent control of 4 LED spot lights to individually light the four seats at our family dining table.

The Christmas holidays should thoroughly test the prototype. Then a final version can be manufactured in the new year with any modifications. Already on the list is a master touch sensor for all on and all off control. Oh and a pretty case to make it an acceptable addition to the lounge. The PCB design is already almost complete in Fritzing.

Details on the touch sensor design used is given on my website. It is very simple using just a diode and 2 resistors to provide capacitive touch sensing. The only change required for use in the Diner Light was to change to using a port interrupt on the Arduino so that 4 channels of interrupt could be implemented on a Atmega328 Arduino.

The LED lamps are driven via a simple transistor current source, thus making the supply voltage non-critical. Further details of the design will be published in the new year with a documentation of the build of the final version. So for now an excerpt from the circuit is shown below. It shows all the main circuit component structures, a touch sensor is on the left and a constant current LED drive is on the right of the Pro Mini.