2 Low Input to 2 Higher Output Relay Board

I did up a quick diagram of the little PCB board I made with some great help from Andrea lannaccone from Face Book. There are smaller ways to do this but this is pretty small too, you can do this type of switching with a Transistor too. For what I am doing with my Top Countdown Indicator lights to activate the switch lights on my Lower Console I only need one side of the board but there was room on the board to have the same ability twice so at least I have an extra setup for should I need to do something similar again. :) 

PCB Board Installed

I installed the small PCB board later today just overtop of the other Relays board I had made a few weeks ago. I have the power wire (blue) going from the fuse panel I installed under the passenger side Hush panel into the magnetic coil and switch terminal of one of the mini Songo 12V 10 Amp Relays, this will supply power to energize the coil and provide power to one side of the Relay switch. The other blue wire you can see coming out of the top of the Relay is the 2nd power wire on the other Relay switch terminal, this wire goes into my Lower Console to supply power to the switch lights. The Relays switch will connect the two completing the circuit. The two input wires Red and Black that connect to the Optocoupler I have going into a couple of spare sockets I had available on my Molex connector for my LCD and GPS screens. Those will provide the low input signal to activate the Optocoupler once the Countdown indicator reaches it's last light, this will in turn activate the Relay making the connection as described before. Tomorrow will be the big day I test this out so if all goes well I'll be doing a video to demonstrate the final effect.

Two Relay Board Activated By Low Signal Optocouplers

There we go, I have a small PCB board set up with two 12V Mini 10 Amp Songo Relays that are each activated separately by two Optocouplers. I only need one side of this board for right now to complete the wiring scenario I mentioned in my last post for turning on the Lower Console switch lights as part of the Knight Rider dash start up sequence.
The Red and Black wires you see coming in from the left side end of the board will ultimately be spliced into the wires that connect from the Voice Box to the last set of lights in the Top Countdown indicators, this way when the Knight Rider V.B. activates those lights a signal will be sent to the Optocoupler, activating my Relay and closing the power connection to the Lower Console switch lights. I did a little tweaking to my diagram so here it is again just so you can see my minor tweaks ;)

DTMF Tone Request Experimentations

In making sure that I well isolate the Voice Box's DTMF tone request from any momentary buttons I have I figured I would rig up a mini Songo 12V Relay very close to the Voce Box. Now what happens here is that when a DTMF Tone request is called by any momentary button I have hooked up to a wire that I am calling "DTMF Tone Request" THAT wire goes to the magnetic coil of this mini Songo 12V Relay's Ground (-), the other side of the magnetic coil goes to 12V (+). So this then trips the Relay's internal isolated switch which I then have connected to both the Voice Box's Ground (-) and also the DTMF Tone Request port. You will have to excuse my somewhat over sized piece of PCB board it was all I had kicking around that I could use to mount this small relay onto and connect wires too. I'll most likely change it later when I get some smaller pieces of PCB Proto-Board. The wires from the Switch Pods that request the DTMF tone I just have going directly into the Voice Box's DTMF Tone request port.

Now the other part of today's fun was to wire up my Relays board for some experimentation just to make sure that I am understanding correctly just what is going on with this thing and how it interacts with my buttons. All of this stuff gets pretty complicated if you are new to electronics like me. ;) My latest video that I posted to my blog explains best and visually how I have it all hooked up. But basically the Ground pulse buttons from my Space Matt buttons go into the ports on the board that connect to the Diodes, they connect to the DTMF Tone Request wire and also to the individual relays on the board. Each relays gets it's own ground pulse from each of the Space Matt buttons activating the Relays internal switch which I can hook up to any device I want to activate, in my case 5 of the Space Matt buttons are simply activating buttons that control the setting for my LCD screen. Although I have not yet hooked it up, a 6th button will cycle the Message Centre while producing a DTMF tone with each press of the button. The rest of the Space Matt buttons I don't have plans for just yet.

My Voice Projection unit activation button is wired up the same way as the Dash Power Button and makes a connection to ground to activate the Step Relay, this one was a little more tricky. You can see in the image above (middle left) that branching off from the wire that comes from the Normally Open terminal of the V.P. power button that I have placed a Diode in-line connecting to the DTMF Tone Request block.... which I moved onto the back of my Relays Board. Without the Diode in place the Space Matt buttons would activate the Step Relay for the Voice Projection unit as well, not good, so the Diode sure takes care of that as it only allows current to travel in one direction... taking me a while to get the hang of that but it works and it's cool... gotta love electronics ;)

So now with all of this in place I'll have to test it out on the Voice Box once the replacement I.C. Chip 01 comes in the mail. If everything works out well, and so far I can't see what not as a Relay does what a Relay does ;) But as I say if all goes well I can look into experimenting with the Optocouplers when they arrive and see if I can make a set up like this that takes up a lot less space. This would be fine if I only wanted to use a small amount of my Space Matt buttons but I can see eventually wanting to use more down the road as I trick out K.I.T.T. with more cool gadgets ;)