Power IoT Relay over BLE?

Hardware
#1

Anyone find a good “off the shelf” relay that I could control over BLE with a Gen3 device? Is something like that possible with BLE? Seems like most off the shelf smart relays are WiFi but I’ll be honest… very new to BLE and what can/cannot be done with a Gen3 particle device and standard BLE outlet.

I’m looking for something like this but considering controlling it via BLE to a Gen3 device instead of a wire.

Iot Relay - Enclosed High-Power Power Relay for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, PIC or WiFi, Relay Shield Amazon.com: Iot Relay - Enclosed High-Power Power Relay for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, PIC or WiFi, Relay Shield: Electronics

I know NCD.IO has many relay options for various devices including particle but didn’t find many solutions that are “industrial” or “customer ready” without making your own enclosure. There is also as well as the adafruit relay featherWing or adding a relay to my own PCB but trying to minimize the time spent developing something “customer/industrial ready” for the outlet itself. I could always add an output to my existing device and control this over a wire but was seeing what other options might be out there. A link or two to other options would be appreciated.

#2

Any 3v relays will work, there’s nothing inherently special about a given relay. How you control it, whether BLE or wifi, is up to your code running on the Gen 3 device.

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#3

Hey, I haven’t found any, but I’m dreaming about this below.

Plenty of these devices:
image

connect to the Tuya cloud. They come in different brands and flavors, even multiple plugs in a bar:

image

My dream is to use the Tuya API and control those from a cloud infrastructure (a google cloud firebase serverless function? or in any other cloud, not sure about a Particle webhook here).
The Particle device could send a signal to the cloud and this will talk to the Tuya cloud and turn on/off the plug.

Unsure about the feasibility or robustness of all this. Home projects ok, but for customers… how do they configure wifi on those devices?

Anyhow, that’s my dream these days…
Gustavo.

2 Likes
#4

So what I’m thinking of is a device exactly like you are talking about from a look and form factor. But what I was envisioning is the Particle Gen3 device can send a command over BLE to the device to turn a relay/outlet like this on or off. I.e. it is completely independent/does not use WiFi. In that case, it’s zero change in hardware for me if a customer wanted to add-on a user controlled outlet like this. I haven’t played with BLE yet to know if something like that existed yet but if it did I suspect other Particle Customers might be interested. My thought is a customer would push a button in my web app… that would call a function on the Particle Gen3 device, that function then sends out a BLE message to that BLE outlet device and the outlet to turn on/off.

Everything I could find today seems to be Wi-Fi controlled. IF it has BLE, I assume that’s mostly for initial device config/setting the WiFi credentials and not for turning it on/off. Being WiFi, I’d assume you could make an API call to their back-end or to the devie to control w WiFi outlet via an API call/webhook or even from Alexa if you wanted. However, almost all of my customers won’t have WiFi and wouldn’t want to configure it to their Wifi anyhow. Since the Gen3s already have BLE I figured maybe there was an option there.

This arrives today from Amazon. I’m sure it’ll work just not as clean as I was hoping. I think I can just wire up a GPIO pin to that green connector on it to turn it on/off. Sometimes the simplest method (i.e. this thing) might be the best method. I’m sure it’s the cheapest from a hardware perspective. I guess we will see.
image

#5

yup, it works just like that, it’s a solid choice.

#6

Yeah…you are right! It just arrived this afternoon via Amazon Prime. Took me all of 3-4 minutes to hook it up to a GPIO pin and get it functional via calling a particle function to turn a GPIO pin on/off. Super simple. Should be dummy proof as well. I think it’s what I’ll go with! Simple, dummy proof and only $29 from Amazon prime. That’s tough to beat…

1 Like