Awesome Prank or Circuit-Breaker Tester?

Many tools can be used either for good or for evil — it just depends on the person flipping the switch. (And their current level of mischievousness.) We’re giving [Callan] the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that he built his remote-controlled Residual Current Device (RDC) tripper for the purpose of testing the safety of the wiring in his own home. On the other hand, he does mention using it to shut off all the power in his house during an “unrelated countdown at a party”. See? Good and evil.

An RCD (or GFCI in the States) is a kind of circuit breaker that trips when the amount of current in the hot and neutral mains power lines aren’t equal and opposite, which would suggest that the juice was leaking out somewhere, hopefully not through someone. They only take a few milliamps of imbalance to blow so that nobody gets hurt. Making a device to test an RCD is easy; a resistor between hot and the protective ground circuit would do.

[Callan] over-engineers. He used a 50 W resistor where 30 W would do under the worst circumstances. A stealthy solid-state relay switches the resistor in, driven by an Uno and a Bluetooth module, so he can trip his circuit breakers from his smartphone, naturally.

He did find one circuit in his house with an unconnected protective earth line, so the device fulfilled its safety function. But it points out a weakness with this project as a prank device: he can only punk people who have properly installed circuit breakers, after all. Relative to the way we’ve tested our circuit breakers, this is a relatively safe project. But still, have a read through our nice guide on working with mains voltage if you’re insecure in your mains safety practices.

Filed under: home hacks

from Hackaday http://ift.tt/2jRBane
via IFTTT