Wireless Light Swtch Panel
I awake. I roll over and press "1" and "3" on a keypad. The 12-volt bedroom light comes on, as well as the light in the galley (No 2 is the bathroom light). When I get to the galley I press No 1 (it...
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If I were building something like this, I'd use a wired bus to connect the keypads and controlled devices. Something based on RS-485 would be a good option. Professional stage lighting systems use DMX-512, which is RS-485 with some protocol conventions, to control up to 512 channels of dimming or whatever; but that would not really be an ideal protocol for an RV application (partly because it's a single master system, whereas we'd want multiple masters). Some sort of a token-passing ring network (whether physically a ring topology or just logically arranged as a ring at the network protocol level) might be appropriate and not too difficult to put together.
Running a cat-5 cable is not really any harder than running a 12V power cable, and the tiny amount of power a keypad and microcontroller unit would require could easily be supplied by additional cat-5 cable conductors.
For added fun, you could put a thermometer at each keypad and control the heating or air conditioning in multiple zones.
Wireless connections are subject to interference, though admittedly modern RF technologies are remarkably resilient even in crowded environments.
Running a cat-5 cable is not really any harder than running a 12V power cable, and the tiny amount of power a keypad and microcontroller unit would require could easily be supplied by additional cat-5 cable conductors.
For added fun, you could put a thermometer at each keypad and control the heating or air conditioning in multiple zones.
Wireless connections are subject to interference, though admittedly modern RF technologies are remarkably resilient even in crowded environments.
