Review on 🏡 Arduino and Raspberry Pi Compatible 4 Channel I2C AC Dimmer Light Bulb Smart Home for 110V 220V 50hz/60hz - Ideal for IOT Projects by Chris Graves

It works like a dimmer but not in the way you might expect. First of all: I am in the USA where the voltage is 120V and the frequency is 60Hz. . I have not tested this at 230V/50Hz. Now the setpoint you program is not a brightness level (e.g. 0=dim, 100=bright, like most "smart” devices I've worked with) but a "dim” level (i.e. each higher the number, the lower the performance). This is stated in the docs I found, so I can't deduct points for this feature. The reason I feel justified in only giving three stars is that while you can put any channel at 100-0, not all valid values are! In fact, the dimming range is much narrower than you might think given the 100-0 range. I had to do some work to make it behave like other power controllers. I've found that values from 0 to about 18 give full power output (>95%) for all intents and purposes. Values between 30 and 48 are fairly linear (72%-30% yield). Values between 66 and about 78 give 100% yield. Anything from here up to 100 gives 0% output. What I ended up doing to "correct" it was to match any given point to the true RMS voltage at the terminals of a connected 40 watt incandescent bulb. I plotted the results and found that in my opinion this device only has about 30 really different output levels, not 100 as you might think. I decided to create a display array that would produce 32 given values (a power of 2), where 0 is off and 31 is on. That's about 3% power dissipation per step. Here is my map (in Python list syntax): map = [ 66, 65, 61, 59, 57, 55, 53, 51, 50, 48, 47, 46, 44, 43, 42, 41, 39, 38, 37 , 35 , 34 , 33 , 32 , 30 , 28 , 27 , 25 , 23 , 21 , 18 , 14 , 0 ] So if I want a power level of 50% (31 * 50% or about 15) I'll take Get the 15th element in my map array which is 41 and write it to the dimmer. With this setting, the **MY** dimmer produces an output voltage of about 84 volts, which is (84 volts/120 volts)^2 = about 49% of the output power as a percentage of the power. very high-quality workmanship, and the blue LEDs for displaying the mains voltage and frequency are pleasant to the touch. On the **MY** block, the triac heatsinks appear to be isolated from the hotline conductor (according to the **MY** voltmeter), but there are many other live points on this board, so be careful. .I would buy it again but I would be more interested in working with the developer to see if there is a way to rewrite the firmware to get the full dimming range. If he or she provides new firmware or microcontroller source code for this device I would happily upgrade this rating to 5 stars.