Looking for programmable timed actuator

Hi,

I'm building a test rig to stress motorcycle starter motors. I want to have an actuator that I can program so that it will trigger the starter motor over a variable period of time, every 15 minutes, every half hour etc.

I also need to be able to program how long it is actuated, i.e. 1 second then wait 15 minutes or run for 10 second and then wait for 15 minutes etc.

I am trying to establish how much damage/extra wear the motors receive when run for longer periods (over 1 second at a time etc.).

I will probably run an SSR to actually switch the power to the starter, so I'm just looking for something that will trigger small voltages, 3 V would be ideal.

Any tips/leads are appreciated.

Thanks,

M./

According to your description, the SSR (I assume this means "solid-state relay"?) is the actuator; are you looking for something to drive the relay from a microprocessor? If you can't drive it directly, seems like an ordinary transistor (2N2222/equiv.) should do the trick.

carbonzit said:

According to your description, the SSR (I assume this means "solid-state relay"?) is the actuator; are you looking for something to drive the relay from a microprocessor? If you can't drive it directly, seems like an ordinary transistor (2N2222/equiv.) should do the trick.

Click to expand...

)

Yes, poor choice of words, what I need is a (prebuilt) circuit or widget that I can set to trigger the SSR on my timetable. For instance I have an AC based timer that turns my espresso machine on in the morning, so once a day I get my trigger. I need something similar but where I can say, turn on every 15 minutes for 1 minute etc.

If it is small and has a low output I can use an SSR to be the actual switch. In the case of my timer above I plug my espresso machine into it and it does the switching itself. Since it was $10 at HomeDepot I was hoping that there is a unit with the features I need available somewhere that someone could point me towards.

Thanks,

Well, since this is posted in the microcontrollers forum, I assumed you were going to use a microcontroller to control your device. Is this not the case? It sounds like you're looking for some other kind of solution, like a circuit that will do this on its own. However, since you want to do fairly complex timing, this might be better done by a microcontroller, which you can easily program to do just about anything.

So not sure what you want, what your electronics/programming skills are, budget, etc.