To start off with I made a basic HW prototype. It was split into two parts, a transmitter and receiver although they are almost identical in terms of hardware. In order to improve the design of the iTead board I decided it would be good to use the mains to power the whole device. If you are doing a mains passthrough and have "unlimited" power, why not used that instead of having to have a micro USB or DC jack!

To do this I used the HLK-PM01 modules by hi-link. Although these modules are cheap chinese modules - they seem to have a small following for projects like these and are very cheap. A great review can be found [here](http://lygte-info.dk/review/Power Mains to 5V 0.6A Hi-Link HLK-PM01 UK.html) (not my review):

During my basic test I was able to achieve basic functionality with the modules, however I had a lot of dropped packets.I believe this was due to the modules I bought off of ebay being "fakes". There are alternate ASICs which are "NRF24L01+" compatible but with inferior performance coming from China. They require a very stable power supply, I had to solder 10uF tantalums directly to the module to alleviate the packet dropping issue.

This is the main module to control the mains, I used the aforementioned HLK-PM01 and a cheap relay board from China to test out the initial functionality.

I made a similar board without the relay and ACDC module on it to act as a controller which can be used with my PC.