INDN 212: Arduino Voodoo Magic

First, right off the bat, I'm going to say I've had mixed success with the pieces of technology. Mostly it's been a massive kick in the cojones though, as I'm about to tell you. The piece of technology that I'm relying on to make this project work is this little piece of "magic" below, the PIR sensor. Now, I have three of these, so ONE of them fortunately is allowed to break. Still not sure if I've broken two of them or not. They're proving to be very tricky devices.

One of the things I've researched and discovered with these is that they are usually circuited in one of two slight different ways. The normal way (and the way that I really need it to work) is called retriggering, which, when rigged up to a circuit causes the wired LED to light up and stay on as long as there is motion. The way that I've discovered the ones I have work is non-retriggering (I believe that is the way that I've found these to work) which causes the LED to flash every time the PIR sensor moves from "no motion detected" to "motion detected", which might be useful for some things, but right now I need the first mode.

According to the internet, I need to use a pull up resistor, a technique which I don't think I have used correctly. Still pending on more info on that. Might have found a way yet. Not sure, and am currently still investigating.

This little baby is what I've spent a lot of time working on. You can't see it, but there are four relays wired up to this. This is a relay driver, which makes it significantly easier to drive relays off the arduino (which can't handle crazy large amperages going through it). It has an external power supply and is turned on and off by simple digital pins on the Arduino.

These aren't part of the Arduino setup, but I wanted to show them regardless. I'm really pleased with how I got them to work, as they just look good. What you see there are the halogen connectors for the shades connected with this awesome twisted black cabling I got online.  I think the twisted black cabling looks really fantastic and makes things a little bit more interesting on my light.