Jurassic Power Panel

I’ve always liked the very mechanical power panel that features heavily in one of the climactic scenes of Jurassic Park. Those I didn’t a beefy lever to prime the charge, I did need a tidy panel for controlling the various power circuits for my fish tank, and this was a chance to do that in a neat style.

Each 120V circuit has a 433Mhz wireless smart plug on a power strip. It’s meant to be used with a remote, but I made a wireless sniffer and found the hex code the remote transmitted for each of the wireless plugs. Having mapped the wireless on/off signal for each of the plugs, it was a simple matter of creating an Arduino program that would transmit either on or off when I pushed the panel buttons. This makes a very safe Arduino control for high voltage circuits as the wireless plugs are completely unmodified and still work with the original remote!

In the movie the buttons and circuit labels light up in a unique way whether the circuit is open or closed. Since some of the logic is flipped on this (meaning some lights turn off when the high voltage is on and vice versa), it was easier to have the Arduino control all this as well.

Lastly, I made my own PCB for the Arduino MEGA which included all the resistors needed for the LEDs, the transistors for controlling the lights, an external voltage converter for the power bus, and pins for incorporating the wireless transmitter.