I have a 10k Potentiometer that is used as a dimmer for some LED lights.
This is for a big building and there are 100s of these. All the pots have been set to about the 90% position. If for some reason we need to adjust the brightness, we have to climb up to the light and adjust it.
What I’m looking for is a way to automate this.
My perfect scenario:
I send out a 0-10vdc signal where
0vdc = 0k ohms
5vdc = 5k ohms
10vdc = 10k ohms
So I would have two wires on one end sending the 0-10vdc signal and on the other end I would have the two wires from the LED lighting control going through the resistive side. It would be linear, so 0-10vdc (IN), would equal 0-10k ohms (OUT).
If we had this simple device we would be able to change the brightness to any of these LED lights around the building, from the comfort of my desk.
Through my research I can’t seem to find something that exists for this application. But this isn’t my area of expertise. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
Not sure if this picture is going to show up, but my idea would be it would look like this.
Hello jmartinson - welcome to the Forum community! I sent a copy of your post to my colleagues in Technical Support and Applications Engineering because I wasn’t certain of an answer for you. As soon as I have any input for you, I will post it here. Thanks!
Please stop to consider the practicalities of the matter; hundreds of lights controlled in this manner would imply hundreds of wire runs, hundreds of control signals etc. and if the need for remote adjustment wasn’t foreseen at the time of installation, it may not be sufficient to justify the spiderweb of new cabling and cost of installation. Beyond this, I’m not immediately aware of any packaged device serving the requested function.
It’s likely (though not certain) that the fixtures in question also support 0~10V dimming; a scheme in which the device to be controlled supplies ~1mA into a control bus, at the end of which is a 0~10V dimmer switch such as one of these, which sinks whatever amount of current is necessary to result in a voltage appearing across the bus that is in the range of 0~10V, proportional to the switch input.
For a single fixture, a 10K pot can approximate the role of the dimmer switch, but this approach does not scale nor accommodate multiple (or varying) numbers of fixtures on the same control bus, since a suitable potentiometer value changes with the number of fixtures sending current through the bus. The current-based approach described above permits numerous individual fixtures to be controlled using a single wire pair, and would likely represent a more practical approach.
