Thursday, November 19, 2015

Dash Auxiliary Power Button


I have a better way of hooking up my dash auxiliary power button as right now the way I have it is a bit daffy and I'll explain why; The scenario works but what happens is that say I have the auxiliary power button turned on and I forget that it is on and then I turn over the cars ignition, well when I turn off the ignition key the car will keep running because power is still being supplied through the lower consoles auxiliary dash power button being turned on, I would then need to switch that off in order to turn the car off. This way is much better because that can't happen as the dash can only get it's power from one source or the other via the relay and not both at the same time which is how I currently have it wired.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Upper Console Latching Switches DTMF Request Part 9



Update:

Ok, after a fair amount of experimenting on the work bench and another test out in the car the ONLY conclusion I can come to is that on my first attempt at trying out my partially built photo board, is that I MUST have had just a loose connection somewhere. I had tried a number of experiments on my work bench to try and duplicate the "Relay Chatter" I had experienced out in the car and was not able too no matter what I tried. Every time the relay clicked over beautifully and reaction time was fast with no hiccups. I then took my upper console and the breadboard outside with a relay on the breadboard to see if perhaps it was the car battery, which I could not see at the battery monitor is reading it at a little over 12V. I hooked up the breadboard and upper console to the car battery and tested out the relay on the breadboard activated through my 555 timer photo board and it worked perfectly, no chatter, no issues. So I revoked up the DTMF tone request wire from the photo board back in under the dash to connect through that "Multiple in - single out" series of diodes, turned on the dash power, and tried out my upper console's DTMF tone request again and this time no problems. So I can only come to the conclusion that I must have had a loose connection somewhere on my first attempt. To be sure though I'll experiment again when I have the board completed for all 5 DPDT lighted rocker switches.... just to be sure. ;)

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Upper Console Rockers DTMF Tone Progress





Ok I have been making some really great headway with the DTMF tone request for the DPDT Upper Console's lighted rocker switches. Burnt a few transistors experimenting though, lol it REALLY helps to have the correct pinouts on those bad boys let me tell you ;)



I'm not sure why I am getting a tone on startup as I wasn't before, my guess is I have missed something, not sure what yet though. But here is my diagram for what we have in the video. I was not able to do all of my rockers switches because I ran out of 1M resistors so I'll need to get some more. ;)

Monday, November 9, 2015

Upper Console Rocker switches DTMF tone Request Progress



Here is the diagram used in the video slightly altered so that the pulse is not sent on power up, also shows how the circuit is attached to the optocoupler for the DTMF tone request pulse that goes out to the Voice Box's random DTMF tone generator.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Momentary Pulse for Latching Switches



We are making some great headway in being able to have the latching DPDT lighted rocker switches of the upper console able to generate a short momentary pulse for the random DTMF tone request of the Voice box using the LM555 timer chip and a few other components.

Here is a diagram showing how I have the switches wired up to the 555 timer circuit. this is really great because originally I thought I was going to need a separate circuit for each on on the rockers. by this method I can get away with once circuit for the upper console's latching switches and one circuit for the lower console's latching push buttons. I should mention that I change the value of R1 to a 200 K resistor and this allows me to flip the switches fairly quickly and still get the needed pulse for the DTMF request. Also for 10 switches R2 is being swapped for a 470 K Resistor. Not that 10 switches can be on at any given time as there are 5 DPDT rockers so only 5 devices can be on at any given time with this circuit so it should be fine I am told.