Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Need help with switch wiring

Status
Not open for further replies.

davecla

New Member
I’ve got a door on my chook house that opens and closes using a linear actuator. The actuator changes between in and out when the polarity is switched on the two input wires. (12v DC)

I currently drive this using a simple "on-off" light switch which drives a DPDT relay to do the polarity reversal.

I’d like to add a level of automation to this to open and close the door based on a timer. I’ve got a 12v electronic timer that will drive a relay. I’ll set this to open at 7:30am and close at 9:30pm.

When the (existing) manual switch is toggled, I want the door to open and close.
At the open and close time I want the door to open and close.
However if I want to change the door position during the day the manual override should still work and…. If the manual override is used (say to close and open) come 9:30pm I want the door to close and then open again at 7:30am.

Can anyone suggest how I might go about the switch configuration? I can’t for the life of me figure this out?

Thanks Dave
 
A little more info needed here. Can you supply a diagram showing how the relay coil is currently hooked up to the timer which controls it (since there are several different ways that this could be done)?
 
Last edited:
Wire the switch and the timed relay like a two way switch system.
**broken link removed**
Replace one of the switches in the above diagram with your timed relay and the bulb should be replaced by the change over relay.

Mike.
 
as i understand your timer will give you one output, either high or low. say it changes from low to high at 9:30pm, then from high to low at 7:30am
you have to make a useful output from this first, add some RC & logic circuit to give you two logic output pulses. one to tell open & other to tell close.

when open goes high(pulse) it has to be latched until the door is fully opened (need feed back & reset the latch)
when close goes high(pulse) it has to be latched until the door is fully closed (need feed back to reset)

now the override is to simply set the latch for open & close by a manual input push button (open & close)
you can wire the logic outputs via driver transistors to operate DPDT switch or auxiliary relays to operate DPDT switch.

may be some one can make the drawing for you

razeen


Edit: as mike told, it will work with two way wiring too, the switch will be for normal position and for override position
 
Last edited:
do you have end of travel switches on the linear actuator? you could use a standard start stop push button for multiple stations . Drawing will be added later. maybe not.
Kinarfi
 
Last edited:
Hello, and happy new year! Thanks for your help here:


The current wiring of the actuator looks like pic below.
The actuator has non adjustable internal limit switches, so the only inputs is the 12v input.

wiring-jpg.49574



The timer relay is still a work in progress, I've taken a plugin mains voltage and converted to operate on 12v. The original relay had a 48v coil so I'm planning to replace it but thought I'd wait until I had nutted out what was needed from the switching.

The output from the timer is high when "on" and low when "off".

The problem I see with a standard two way switch is that the toggling of the switches could get "out of step" ie, door closed manually (for some reason), then when the designated "close time" comes, this then opens the door.

Hope this is making sense, and thanks for your help, dave
 

Attachments

  • wiring.jpg
    wiring.jpg
    11.3 KB · Views: 1,512
The problem I see with a standard two way switch is that the toggling of the switches could get "out of step" ie, door closed manually (for some reason), then when the designated "close time" comes, this then opens the door.

Hope this is making sense, and thanks for your help, dave

you are right about out of step, so only way you can solve is to make it operated by pulses, pulse from state change of the of the timer or manual push button to latch a relay.
 
Here's how my elevator is wired, If you use a maintained automatic relay and normally open push buttons, the door will alway return to where the relay says after responding to the push button

oh yea, the open/close relay contacts are color coded instead of labelled
 

Attachments

  • post.PNG
    post.PNG
    21.1 KB · Views: 248
Last edited:
There is no real easy answer to this operation as when all inputs are needed to be used as individual systems there will always be conflicts.

If it was me i would bung a micro controller in the system and gate all inputs (timer and manual switch) through the micro, and use logic to control the actuator as required.

As my choice of micro is frowned upon on this forum i will leave any micro discussions to others.

Pete.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top