IoT meets Stretch Limousine

Sometimes ago a customer asked us for help with the interior control of his Lincoln stretch limousine. The old solution was not so nice, there was no comfortable solution for the driver to control the lighting in the passenger cabin and he wants a remote control via mobile app in the future. Our Solution fulfills the following requirements:

• control via touch screens with modern GUI
• 2nd touch screen for the driver
• communication of all components via WiFi
• rugged design
• simple to extend

We've used the ESP8266 - especially the Wemos D1 mini - for our solution. These modules comes with integrated USB  Module (makes programming easy), are supported by a big community, they need no boot time and are very simple and rugged. We've used the Arduino IDE for the programming of the firmware. Only the control board and touch screens are new - the old relay boards are used for this new solution again:

For the touch panels we've used Nextion touch screens. All pictures and other data of the GUI is stored in the Nextion touch itself. It's very easy to connect these touch screens to a microcontroller (in our case Wemos D1 mini too) via the UART.

Both touch screens are connected to self made panel boards equipped with WEMOS D1. The panel board send data of touch events via UDP to the control board. The control board send the status of all switches, temperatures and the level of the fan via UDP back. These status protocols take care  that both touch screens and later the APP shows the same values...

All light effects are made with RGB led stripes connected to LED controllers. The control board can send infrared commands to control the color and brightness of the RGB stripes. Furthermore a fiber based "starry sky" is integrated in the ceiling. This starry sky is controlled by an special unit. We can control this unit via a RF remote control on the control board