0-10v Insteon dimmer

[apostolakisl]

The Insteon 10v dimmer, for whatever reason, is not a sinking voltage.  Instead of sinking 0-10v to ground, it provides 0-10v of output.  So it would work on theater lights . .. who has those?  Anyway, I am trying to figure out how to get ISY to dim my 10v dimming lights and basically need a pot that sinks the 10v control voltage to ground.  infinity resistance and the lights are on full, zero resistance and the lights dim to almost off, and everything in between. 

I found this https://www.adafruit.com/product/4286

Anybody know anything about this?  I would like ISY to control it, but I just don't know how to interface it.

[larryllix]

2 hours ago, apostolakisl said:

The Insteon 10v dimmer, for whatever reason, is not a sinking voltage.  Instead of sinking 0-10v to ground, it provides 0-10v of output.  So it would work on theater lights . .. who has those?  Anyway, I am trying to figure out how to get ISY to dim my 10v dimming lights and basically need a pot that sinks the 10v control voltage to ground.  infinity resistance and the lights are on full, zero resistance and the lights dim to almost off, and everything in between. 

I found this https://www.adafruit.com/product/4286

Anybody know anything about this?  I would like ISY to control it, but I just don't know how to interface it.

The I2C interface is very popular on the arduino and RPi areas. It is a serial interface using four wires. Common, Data, Clock and usually Vcc. AFAIK the two boards provides a hardware serial port that gets encoded onto the lines and talks serial to boards. AFAIK there are 256 addresses. I have 4 servo controllers boards that can handle 64 servo motors quite nicely from a RPi CPU board. AFAIK you can just daisy chain your I/O devices on the same bus and control them all. I have one board for 16 servos working at the moment from a RPi 1

I am thinking you could use a RPi 0 or an Arduino board to interface WiFi to this Digital Potentiometer to do your job. You could stick a set of boards inside each fixture or one in a RF transparent box and run an I2C bus to each fixture. Perhaps you have a central 10v dimming hub they could be shoved into?

[ELA]

if you already have the Insteon sourcing device and want to convert to sinking here  is a similar discussion:

 

https://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/107842/Convert-Sourcing-0-10v-to-0-10v-Sinking

It would take some experimentation if you are up for that.    

[apostolakisl]

  @ELA

 

Thanks for the link.  Missed it when you posted.  This is exactly what I am looking for . .. I think.

[apostolakisl]

@ELA  Not an EE, but looking at how that worked, I think it might produce backwards results.  10v sourcing dimmers output 10v for max brightness, 10v sinking dimmers have an open circuit for max brightness.  If I understand this circuit correctly, this would do the opposite.

[apostolakisl]

@ELA  Not an EE, but looking at how that worked, I think it might produce backwards results.  10v sourcing dimmers output 10v for max brightness, 10v sinking dimmers have an open circuit for max brightness.  If I understand this circuit correctly, this would do the opposite.

[ELA]

As stated it would take some experimentation.  There were two examples given.   

The idea being that with a few components you can translate the signal to be the configuration you need.