Comment by arnarbi
6 hours ago
Very cool. Is it controlling the plugs via direct Bluetooth connection? Or zigbee via a hub, or wifi (direct or via service)?
I always assumed, probably incorrectly, that there would be too much jitter in the actual timing so I had built a few prototypes of e.g. an esp8266 controlled relay, where you would give the MCU a duration rather than separate on/off commands. But I guess that was wildly over-optimizing. In your case, how stable is the delay from the app sending a command until the switch operates?
I'd add voice mode for color printing in total darkness.
I was curious about timing accuracy too, has any testing been done on this? Is it accurate to 1s, 0.1s, 0.01s? How dependent is it on the smart switch hardware?
I played with development photos in a darkroom a long time ago. I don't think one second actually makes much difference.
Depends on how powerful of a light you’re using. 1 second on a 7 second exposure is too much. One second on a 20, not.
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I'd probably put the typical smart switch hardware/software stack at around 0.25 seconds. Maybe you can but I don't think I'd try to rely on anything much faster than that.
If you did, I would go in the custom firmware for the smart switch direction. A lot of them are just an ESP32 inside, and you could probably get to 0.001 seconds that way (but you are switching AC which cycles on the order of 0.02 seconds, so whatever)