HA!!!
I finally have gotten around to experimenting with the PROP-1 board I bought back in March. Tonight I made a trip to Radio Shack, and bought a few relays and after some pretty ugly hardware hacking (I didn’t bring my soldering iron to work today) I managed to get one of my halloween props controlled by the PROP-1. I had initially thoght I would be a bit more fancy about how I was going to run the triggering inside the little squacking crow but the more I mapped out the circuit in the crow the more problems I kept running into. I finally setted on just using a reed relay and inserting it with the “test” button on the crow. The relay coil is then powered directly from one of the outputs of the prop-1. Now when the prop-1 sees motion from its PIR sensor it fires off a couple events, one of which is to squack the crow. I had also planned on using the CRYDOM SSR’s to control my foggers and the pop up jumper, but when I ordered them they only had 2 in stock. That left me with one to few relay control. So for the moment I have rigged up a DPDT relay on another output of the prop-1. The interesting thign about this is that I coudl theoretically control the two foggers quite easil now off one pin on the PROP-1. I setup a loop in the cotroller that is its wait state while looking for the PIR. during this loop it counts up to a set number, and then when that number hits it toggles teh state of the relay. This in theory, if timed right should give me the ability to have constant fog. While one fogger re-heats the other fogger starts fogging. I worry thoguh that this will have a few unwated side effects. The 1st being that there will be to much fog. The second side effect would be that the fog juice will be consumed much to fast and I will run the risk of destroying the foggers. (Granted I got them both for $5 at the end of the season closeout at Target but i’d rather not destroy them.) I am considering modding the foggers to have larger tanks… or to draw from the bottles of juice directly. The other alternative, would be to use a float switch that kills power to the foggers when the juice runs out. I’m pretty sure thought the fog juice would gum up the switch. I’ll have to think on that one some more. I still have a few weeks yet. Now its time to pac this stuff up and go home though.
John's Musings 