On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 18:39 US/Pacific, roines reenig wrote:

> I think we have drifted a little bit from what I attempted to describe
> initially.

I was wondering about that.  You were mostly interested in how to get
power at (for instance) a lightswitch, when you only have access to the
"hot" side of the connection, and the load, right?

Most things that do this (ie X10 dimmer switches, or regular dimmers,
for that matter) rely on the load being essentially a slightly
resistive path to the return (a 100W lightbulb has a resistance of only
130 ohms or so, so it's pretty easy to get 50mA worth of 5V out of
there somehow.
That's why they "only" work on resistive loads.  Sneaky, eh?

BillW

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