Low Latency Local Light Network

It’s been 10 years since my last endeavor into home automation. Home assistant barely existed, Zigbee was still pre-3.0, and everything off the shelf was pretty clunky. I lived with an EE classmate at the time, and DIY’ed the entire house together with custom electronics and NRF24 radios.

While it solved all the problems of the ready-made solutions at the time – high latency, low light quality, terrible dimming behavior – it was a pain to set-up and maintain, did not connect to one central place, and required constant manual firmware updates every time we updated a module.

Now, 10 years later, I’m giving it another try. New hardware – both compatible with our old NRF24 network, and home assistant / ZigBee 3.0, hoping to make another low latency network, this time with the user experience of the modern stuff.

The first board is a 4 channel high resolution (16 bit) high refresh rate (20kHz) PWM dimmer, with a 60W 24V Meanwell PSU on the back. The purpose – replacing all of my old 80CRI 2200k ambient bulbs with 95CRI led strips.