230V Light switch to control intensity and drive two bulbs

Question

I'm looking a way to improve a lighting solution. The idea : to use a basic electrical switch already present in my room wall (with Line switched by the toggle switch + Neutral not switched) to control two lamp sources : one with low Lux and a given tint, a second one with high Lux and another tint.

Use case : when I firstly toggle the switch from Off to On : I want that the first lamp lights up. When I quickly toggle the switch from Off to On both times : I want that the two lamps light up.

In another word : I want to design a circuit to detect two rising front. I think about microcontroller circuit, or a basic flip/flop or shift register design. But I wonder if someone as an idea ?

I guess such circuit already exists, because some light bulb includes that feature (with n on/off cycle to control the light intensity), but I can't find solution or idea.

Thanks for your support.

Answer 1

The simplest way is probably to use 220V Latching Relay. At each pulse, those change states and remain in position even if there is no power.

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For MCU based, It's difficult to have a small implementation because you will need at least a power supply.

Arduino does have some very small boards though.

The idea is to when the system is switched on, the capacitor starts to charge. If it was off for a long time, the voltage on the capacitor will be 0V, if it was switch quickly two times in a row, the second time, the voltage will be somewhere between 0V and VCC.

Using an MCU, you can check whether this capacitor is 0V or not, if not, the switch was pressed twice.

You may need to adjust R1, R2 and C1 to have the proper timings.

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

This would only reliably work only for switching twice.

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Another method is to have an MCU with non-volatile memory and an RTC clock that has its own battery. You can then store the state in the NVM and the clock to know the timings.

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One more method is to have a large enough input cap (like a super-cap) so that the MCU can run for a few seconds when the power is cut off so that you can count the switches.

^{simulate this circuit}