Home Automation: Creating a custom switch board

 A lot of home automation products are available in the market. This is one prototype which I had created along with my friend Vinod Hosamani. Although it might not be suitable for mass production, but in order to demo the concept it was good enough. It got a good reception from audience as well. 

In this post I shall cover on building the hardware prototype. Software details I shall discuss in another post. We first bought a switch board casing from market. This is from GM Modular(https://www.gmmodular.com/).

Then we started creating a touch panel using glass plate. Glass plate was cut exactly to fit the casing from GM.

The black radium was cut with circles. You'll further see it once it is placed on the glass plate.

On the back I then started placing touch sensors as shown below,

The touch sensor is TTP 223 based which has good sensitivity and shall work with both 3.3v and 5v.

It has 3 pins  VCC, GND and Output. The behavior of output can be controlled by shorting A and B given as solder option. In below image, one can see the 4 different ways in which output can be configured.

We connected all VCCs and GNDs on common rails. Then used output wires from each touch sensor separately. Next we used another glass plate in a way that touch sensors are sandwiched between two glass plates.

This now looked something like shown in above picture. We then connected the rest of circuit which had relays, power circuit and provision to connected a ESP based node MCU.

The circuit is crude and as mentioned earlier, the whole idea was to quickly develop a presentable prototype. Now we were able to put everything together, flash a small ESP software and we used blynk(https://blynk.io/) app to control the switches from cellphone. It finally looked like this,

This project was done 4 years prior to writing this here. I couldn't post a video along side(may be I lost it 😔 ). But I'll further write on how we improved this model and created our own custom PCB, APP and cloud infrastructure.
Share your comments. 😊