DIY Sequential Turn Signal Block Diagram

Description

Want more in-depth design information about the sequential turn signals circuit presented in a previous video? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows a high-level diagram and a simple voltage conditioning circuit to convert a switched 12 volt on/off signal to a 5 volt logic signal. This is a follow-up to a question asked in a comment on this DIY sequential turn signal circuit video.

Resources:
Block diagram images and memory layout (GitHub)
Pulse generator circuits (Google search)
Voltage regulator circuits (Google search)
Binary counter data sheet (PDF)
Buffer datasheet (PDF)

Here at House of Hacks we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more related to making things around the home and shop. Generally this involves wood and metal working, electronics, photography and other similar things. If this sounds interesting to you, go subscribe and click the bell to get notifications.

There's a playlist containing videos talking about the House of Hacks' values.

And here’s the most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to DIY Sequential Turn Signal Block Diagram

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing

Transcript

A couple days ago on this sequential turn signal video, JTinnon asked if I could share the schematics for this circuit.

I put this together a couple decades ago and honestly cannot remember if I made a schematic for it or not.

I looked in the couple places where thought I might have them stashed and couldn’t find any so I drew out some block diagrams.

I’ll show these right now at the House of
Hacks.

[Intro]

Hi! Harley here.

If you’re interested in workshop projects made out of things like wood, metal and electronics, consider subscribing so you won’t miss a
thing.

In the previous video JTinnon commented on, I discussed the philosophy of design for this project and displayed a couple partial diagrams, but I never showed the whole thing.

In this video, I’ll show the complete, high-level diagram.

And everything I show today can be downloaded from GitHub at the link below.

There are also links to other resources that might be helpful in understanding this circuit.

First, here’s a block drawing of all the functional pieces.

I go into this in more detail in the earlier video, but again in brief, there’s a pulse generator whose output is fed into the input of a binary counter.

The pulse generator can be any circuit producing regular pulses that can be detected by the input of the binary counter.

In my case I used a 555 timer in an astable multivibrator configuration with a variable resistor in order to be able to control the speed.

Two sequential bits on the output of the binary counter are fed in to the least significant bits of the address lines on the ROM.

The output from switches indicating right, left and brake are fed into the inputs on address bits 2, 3 and 4 of the ROM.

The 12v signals coming from the switches are conditioned through some voltage shifters.

Address bits 5, 6 and 7 are unused and tied to ground.

The data outputs from the ROM are fed into the inputs of a buffer chip that is subsequently used to drive display circuitry.

Next, let’s look at the schematic for the voltage shifter since it’s a little bit unique.

The issue is the signal coming from the switches is either 12 volts or nothing.

12 volts is too high for the 5 volt logic circuits.

And the logic gates can't cope with the floating, non-connected switch when it's turned off.

So the 12 volt on/off signal needs to be converted to 5 volts that is either a voltage or ground.

To do this, I used a 5 volt zener diode in a voltage regulator configuration.

This changes the 12 volts to 5 volts.

Next I put in a resistor to ground in parallel.

This ensures that when there’s no connection, the signal goes to ground instead of floating at an indeterminate value.

The voltage for all the logic circuits comes from a 7805-based regulator.

There are lots of schematics for this on the web.

I've left links in the resources section below.

But if I were doing this again, I’d probably use a buck converter for better efficiency.

And here’s how I programmed the memory.

Given there are 5 address lines being used, that means there are 32 memory locations that need to be programmed.

Since the bottom two address bits vary by time from 0 to 3 and address lines 2, 3 and 4 represent switch states that can be from 0 to 7, the whole thing can be thought of as 8 groups of 4.

Each group represents one combination of switch settings and the 4 items in that group represent what lights are on at four points in time.

I hope that gives some additional insight into this circuit design.

I’m thinking about doing a similar circuit that uses an Arduino.

Leave a comment below if this is something you’d be interested in.

Thanks for joining me on this creative journey that we’re both on.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection’s not required.

Fun is!

How to use an outlet tester

Description

When working on electrical outlets, a must have tool is the outlet tester. In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley show how to use one of these inexpensive tools to test receptacles for proper power and ground wiring. They are also an easy way to test an outlet to see if the power is off prior to working on the wall plug.

A list of 110 receptacle testers from different manufacturers (Affiliate link)

Subscribe for more DIY videos.

Watch my most recent video.

For a written transcript, go to How to use an outlet tester

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

If you do anything with 110 volt receptacles or outlets and wiring them, you need one of these. We're going to talk about what it is and how to use it, today at the House of Hacks.

[Intro]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers.

Harley here.

Wiring 110 volt receptacles or outlets are pretty simple and straight-forward for the average DIYer. There's only three wires to connect and they're all color coded. So as long as the circuit was installed correctly originally, replacing the outlet is really trivial.

But when you do replace an outlet, you do want to make sure you use one of these tools. They're designed to tell you if things are wired properly or if you have safety issues. They're really inexpensive and you can pick them up on Amazon for less than $5. I'll leave a link to a bunch of them down in the description below.

To use one of these, all you do is you just plug it in. It has three lights on it that light up and, depending on what order the lights are lit and which ones are lit, it'll tell you the status of the outlet.

The best condition is that it's lit up as correct and you're good to go.

There are a number of problem that may occur. The first one is open ground. This is where the ground wire is not connected. The ground wire is typically green or copper without any insulation on it at all and in this case you need to make sure it's connected and make sure it's properly connected to ground on the other end.

The next one is open neutral. This means the white wire is not connected for some reason. You need to go in there and trace the white wire and find out where the disconnect is.

The next one is open hot. This means the black wire is not connected properly. In this case nothing will work when you plug something into it because there is no power actually reaching the outlet.

The last two are safety concerns because if you plug something into the outlet with these configurations then you may have power exposed to the user in ways that are unsafe. Which is why one of these tools is really important to use to make sure everything is good.

The first of these two critical ones is hot neutral reversed. And this means the black wire and the white wire are backwards. You just need to take the plug off and reverse those two wires and you should be good to go.

And the last one is hot ground reversal. This means that the hot wire and the ground are backwards which are the black and the green wires or the plain copper one, depending on the wire that's used. And in that case, just these two need to be switched around.

That covers all the error cases and also the good case. So, make sure you use one of these anytime you're wiring up an outlet just to make sure everything's safe for your users.

And until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

How to select a power supply

Description

A contact recently asked "How do I select a power supply for my project?" Once a project moves past the prototyping state using a battery, picking the power supply is a critical element of a personal electronics project. In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley discusses the four items to consider when choosing a surplus power supply.

For a written transcript, go to How to select a power supply

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com

Transcript

What do turkey basters and power supplies have to do with each other? And why am I in the kitchen? We're going to talk about all this today at the House of Hacks.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

I was recently asked about selecting a power supply for a hacked together project. There are four things when selecting a power supply that you need to pay attention to.

The first two are simple. The last two are a little be more complex but not too bad.

First is the input, you need to make sure that your power supply is appropriate for what you're plugging it into. For the most part you're going to be using locally supplied power supplies, probably surplus stuff that you've scavenged, and in that case it's going to work because it's designed for your local environment. In the United States that's going to be 110 to 120 volts AC. Pretty much anywhere else in the world, with a few exceptions, it's 220-240 volts AC. So the first item, while it's there and you need to be aware of it, it's really simple.

The second item has to do with the output. Power supplies can either output volts AC, indicated by VAC or a squiggly line or it can output in volts DC, indicated by VDC or a straight line. And you need to select the type of current that's appropriate for your project. Most, if you're doing low-voltage stuff, most of those are going to be DC, but depending on what you're working on, AC may be appropriate for your case.

The last two items are volts and amps. And these are similar to properties of water systems so we'll look at that here in a minute with the turkey baster and the sink.

But in short, volts have to do with, kind of, the pressure that the electrons are pushing into your circuit. And you need to make sure that this is appropriately ranged for your circuit you're working with. Generally circuits have a minimum and maximum voltage. You need to make sure that the voltage coming from the power supply fits within those parameters.

And finally there's amperage. Amperage is more like capacity. So it has to do with, as long as your power supply meets minimum requirements for your circuit, you're good to go. Your power supply can provide more amps than you need, it just can't provide less. So, make sure you know what your circuit requires and your power supply at least meets that minimum.

For example, a circuit that requires 250 milliamps (ma) would work just fine with a power supply that supplies 250 ma, 500 ma or 100 amps. Any of those would work just fine. However, if the power supply says it's rated for 100 ma, that's going to be too little and your circuit won't work right.

So let's go look at the sink and see how water correlates to volts and amps.

OK. As I mentioned, volts have to do with the amount of pressure and amps have to do with the capacity.

If you think about a water system, there's a whole lot of capacity here. The city has probably thousands of acre-feet of water that are sitting behind these pipes. They can provide pretty much all the capacity that we need for our little simple demonstration here.

It also has a lot of pressure. We control the pressure by the knob here, the lever, and if we put this on here and we give it just a little bit. This would be like not enough volts where we have a really weak stream here and the circuit isn't going to work right because it just doesn't have enough oomph to make it work.

If we increase the pressure to just the right amount, we get a nice flow without overdoing things and we reach a point of equilibrium here where the equivalent of the circuit is going to work just fine because we have the right amount coming in, not too much, not too little and everything's going to work just fine. And this is kind of equivalent to the volts controlled by the lever here.

If we increase the voltage too much though, what we end up with is a lot of leaks. And when you have leakage in electronics, that's a really bad thing. Things tend to blow up, burn up, magic smoke escapes, all that kind of good stuff. So you really don't want to put too much voltage to your circuit. You want to have just the right amount of volts that you get a good flow like that without having too much.

But now in all these cases, regardless of how much voltage I had, how much pressure I had coming out of the circuit, I still had huge, huge, vast amounts of water sitting in reservoirs behind these pipes. And that's equivalent to your amps. Your circuit will only use the amount of amps that it needs, regardless of how much capacity your power supply has.

So in summary, there are four things to look at: the input voltage and current and the output current, volts and amps. Make sure that you have the sufficient volts within the range that the circuit is designed for and that you have at least the minimum number of amps that are required by the circuit and you're good to go.

Until next time, go make something.

Perfection's not required. Fun is!

What is dielectric grease and why should I use it?

Description

What is dielectric grease? Why should I use dielectric grease? How do I use it? Dielectric grease is something used on automotive electrical connections. It is relatively unknown and has some misinformation floating around regarding it. In this House of Hacks video, Harley talks about the what, why and how of using it.

This is part of a collaboration with Mike at Tomahawk DIY. In his video, he shows how to change the brake light bulb on a 2005 Jeep Grand Cherokee.

With Tomahawk DIY, Mike is building a business dedicated to helping people Build Better Lives. A substantial portion of revenue is donated to organizations that focus on helping people build better lives in some of earth's most dire circumstances. Visit his About page to learn more about the mission of Tomahawk DIY and use this Amazon Affiliate link to help support that work: Buy Dielectric Grease.

For a written transcript, go to What is dielectric grease and why should I use it?

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Incidental: “Beach Bum" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Special effects: livingroom_light_switch by AlienXXX at http://freesound.com

Transcript

[Music]

Hey, I wonder if Harley knows his brake light is out. That could cause a real problem.

[Door slam]

Hey Harley.

Yeah.

Did you know your brake light's out?

No, I didn't know that. There's a car store right around the corner. Why don't we go get some parts.

Yeah, it's a really easy fix. I'll show you how.

Awesome. Sounds great!

[Buying parts]

Today at the House of Hacks, we're going to talk about replacing light bulbs and using dielectric grease.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

This is Mike from Tomahawk DIY and we're going to be talking about two things. One on his channel about how to replace a brake light and on my channel this videos going to be about what dielectric grease is and why you should use be using it.

In Mike's video, we put some dielectric grease in the fitting before putting in the new bulb.

In this video, I want to talk about what dielectric grease is and why we used it.

While shooting the bulb changing video, we ran into a problem that is a great example of why dielectric grease really should be used.

We'd taken the old bulb out, put the new one in and put the socket back in the tail light assembly.

When we tested it, it didn't work. After some checking, I found corrosion on the socket connectors.

Dielectric grease helps inhibit this type of corrosion.

If these had grease put on them at the factory, they wouldn't have corroded this way.

So what is dielectric grease?

It's a silicon based grease that is non-curing and non-conductive.

Coming out of the tube, it has a, well, greasy type consistency, and being non-hardening, it maintains this consistency.

It stays this way and doesn't get hard or setup.

Here I have the multi-meter here setup to measure resistance.

When I put a drop on the probes, we can see it is non-conductive until I press the probes together and they make metal-to-metal contact.

Bare metal will have a chemical reaction to the oxygen in the air, called oxidation or corrosion.

Oxidation is less conductive than the metal, causing the flow of electricity to be reduced.

If there's not much oxidation, the reduction isn't enough to cause a problem.

However, in the harsh, sometimes wet, environment of a car, oxidation can build up over time to be a problem.

At best, it will decrease voltage causing lights to dim and other devices not to work properly.

In extreme cases, it can cause increased heat as the current attempts to break through and cause plastic to melt, shorts and sparks and, in the worse case, a fire.

Dielectric grease does a couple things to help combat these problems.

First, it's an insulator and helps prevent arcing between air gapped metal.

In high-voltage situations, this can help reduce voltage leakage, like in the engine's ignition system.

But in the low voltage situation of lighting, this isn't it's primary benefit.

In normal use, any place there's air gapped terminals, the air is sufficient insulation.

It's primary benefit comes as a non-hardening sealant.

When it's liberally applied to an electrical connection, it coats the metal and surrounds the terminals.

But being squishy, it is pressed out of the way on the metal-to-metal contact points.

This creates a sealed electrical connection that prevents both air and water from getting to the metal.

Keeping the water out of the connector helps eliminate short circuits and keeping the air out limits corrosion from happening.

It also helps the plastic and rubber parts of the connectors.

The oils in the grease help minimize gassing off of the plastic's oils.

This in turn helps prevent the plastic from getting brittle.

It also lubricates rubber fittings to let them seal better but not fuse.

All these things combined make the connector easier to take apart next time the bulb needs to be replaced.

I've seen some more expensive cars with dielectric grease on fittings from the factory.

And I've heard of people who will go through their vehicle when they first get it and put grease on all the connectors.

Usually these are people who put their vehicles in unusually harsh circumstances, particularly off-road or marine environments.

Personally, I use it whenever I replace something, but I don't go out of my way to take things apart specifically to add grease to them.

But given this most recent situation, I may rethink that.

If this is your first time here at House of Hacks: Welcome, I'm glad you're here and would love to have you subscribe.

I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark.

Sometimes this manifests through making things with a mechanical or technical bent.

Through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage these types of makers in their creative endeavors.

Usually this involves various physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography and other similar materials.

If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I'll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey.

Now, go make something. Perfection's not required. Fun is!

How to easily make a low-voltage, remote shop vac switch

Description

Controlling appliances remotely can be useful, but some ready made solutions are pretty expensive. Today Harley shows an inexpensive way he uses to turn his shop vac on and off remotely. The same items could be used to control any appliance remotely.

The central part of this system is the PowerSwitch Tail. It contains an electronically controlled switch to turn things on an off. There are a large number of ways to control this. In this episode, we talk about a very easy way to use this device. In future episodes, we’ll expand on different ways to control this switch that can be useful around the shop environment.

PowerSwitch Tail II (Amazon affiliate link)

For a written transcript, go to How to easily make a low-voltage, remote shop vac switch

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Sound effect: living-room-light-switch by alienxxx at http://freesound.org

Transcript

In the comments of “How to quiet a shop vac”, Rob liked the low-voltage remote switch aspect of how I control the vacuum and he asked “Can you show me an example and material break-down that could easily then be added onto?”

Today at the House of Hacks, I will talk about that very thing.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

When I converted my shop vac to a central, plumbed in system, I wanted a way to easily start and stop it. I went through a couple designs before settling on the one I used. Today I’ll show a variation on my design that's an easy way of controlling a shop vac with a simple wired remote.

While my application is a shop vac, you could actually control anything using this technique. In the future I plan to show some upgrades to this control, but for now, I wanted to keep it really simple.

Before I start, I do want to point out that there are ready made solutions from expensive to cheap. I’ve not tried any of these to be able to make any specific recommendations but I did want to mention them for the sake of completeness.

If you just want to get the job done without hassling with making something yourself, you might want to investigate these. But if you want something that’s got your own style to it, you want to learn something, you need something that’s not available off-the-shelf or just want to have the joy of making something, hopefully the following will help.

At the core of how I made mine is a device called a PowerSwitch Tail. This is a short cord that looks very much like an extension cord. It has a plug on one end and an outlet on the other. What sets this apart from other extension cords is it has an electrically controlled switch built into it.

On the side of this box are two connectors. When these connectors have between 3 and 12 volts DC applied to them, the main power is turned on. When there is no voltage on the connectors, the main power is turned off. It only draws up to 30 milliamps, so it’s pretty easy to control with electronics, like an Arduino or other digital circuitry.

However, the easiest way to control this is simply with one or more batteries, a bit of wire and a switch. In this example, I’m using some D cells because that’s what I had lying around, but a 9 volt battery would be simpler and smaller.

To use it, just connect the negative side of the battery to the minus connector. Connect the positive side of the battery to one side of a switch and the other side of the switch to the plus connector. Now, when the switch is on, the device will be on and when the switch is off, the device will be off.

And that’s the easiest way I know to remote control a vacuum, or any device. The cost of the PowerSwitch Tail is around $30 and the wire and switch is based on what you want to use. You may have something in your junk drawer that could be used, like a USB cable or network cable that could have the ends cut off. Switches could be scavenged from dead electronics.

Or you could get new materials. Low voltage wire is a couple cents a foot at the home improvement stores and they have a wide variety of switches for a couple dollars each. A box to mount the switch in could be anything from a disposable food container to something more robust. Just use your imagination.

As I mentioned at the start, I do plan to do follow-up videos talking about different, more capable, although more complicated, ways to switch the PowerSwitch Tail on and off.

In conclusion, let’s have a conversation in the comments about buying off-the-shelf solutions versus making your own, or anything else you’re interested in.

If this is your first time here at House of Hacks: Welcome, I’m glad you’re here. We’d love to have you subscribe. I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark and through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage makers in their creative endeavors. Usually this involves various physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography and other similar materials. If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I’ll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey. Now, go make something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just have fun!

How to fix a fluorescent lamp

In this video, I show the basic parts of a fluorescent lamp and how to replace the ballast.

More online resources: http://www.edisontechcenter.org/Fluorescent.html

Transcript

Today in the House of Hacks, I'm going to try to fix the annoying buzz in this light fixture.

Hi makers, builders and do-it-yourselfers, Harley here.

I don't know if you noticed it or not in the last video, but there was a real irritating hum coming from this lamp fixture. And it got so bad as I was working in the shop over the holidays that I just turned the lamp off.

About fifteen years ago I installed four of these light fixtures and in the intervening years I've replaced all of the lights probably two or three times except for this one, probably four or five times. Each time I replaced it they work for about six months or so and then the light output dims down and they start humming until I just take the lights out.

Fluorescent lamps have been around since about the 1880s. They weren't commercially viable until the 1930s. It took this long to do the development of them because while conceptually they're really simple, you have mains lines coming in, going into a ballast, and then from the ballast, power going into the tube. Pretty simple, just two items. But from an engineering standpoint, what's going on in the ballast and what's going on in the tube, are fairly complex. Primarily, the ballast has to control a lot of details with starting the tube up. And then there's the physical design and chemical composition of the tube that's fairly complex also. So, while simple, they're also complex. That's why it took 50 years for them to go from research to commercially viable.

The purpose of the ballast is actually two-fold. First, it controls the rather complex startup of the lamp. And because of this complexity, there have been a number of strategies used over the years as fluorescent tubes have been developed. The second thing that a ballast does is simply deliver high-voltage, low current, alternating current to the tube to keep it running once it's been lit. For this reason, low voltage fluorescent lamps, like are found in RVs, and high voltage fluorescent lamps, like you might find in the shop, many times can use the same fixtures, the physical case, and the same tubes. The only difference is the ballast that's designed for different voltages to work from. But they all convert to the same output voltage for running the tube.

Interestingly, incandescent lamps start with a very low resistance and increases the resistance as they warm up. This creates a condition where it automatically limits the amount of current and keeps them from developing a short circuit. However, fluorescent lamps are exactly the opposite. They start out at a very high resistance and decrease resistance as they warm up. So, the job of the ballast is two fold. First of all it controls startup, warms the lamp up, gets it going. Then, as it does warm up, it decreases the current to the lamp to keep it from a self-destructive melt down.

There are two types of ballast: magnetic and electronic. The difference is kind of like the difference between a linear power supply, like you might find in a heavy component stereo amplifier, and a switching power supply, like you find in most consumer electronics these days. Older units like mine have magnetic ballasts. More recently, electronic ballasts have started to take over due to lower manufacturing costs and increased reliability. The rise of CFLs in the last decade or so is due in part to the development of these electronic ballasts.

The fluorescent tube contains a low pressure mix of mercury vapor and an inert gas, typically argon. The inside of the tube is coated with a mixture of phosphorus. The ballast creates and maintains an arc going through the tube. The arc going through the mercury causes an emission of ultraviolet light. The ultraviolet light is absorbed by the phosphorus which then turns around and emits visible light. This process of absorbing one frequency of light and emitting a different one is called fluorescence. Hence the term "fluorescent tube." And can be found in other places besides just lights. And finally the color temperature of the light is controlled by what other chemicals are mixed in with the phosphorus in that coating on the inside.

So that's a summary on the theory of operation of fluorescent lamps. A great resource online that has a lot more detail can be found at Edison Tech Center and I'll leave a link in the description below.

Since fluorescent lights are so simple, about the only thing that can cause this kind of constant failure is a bad ballast. So, that's what I'm going to replace in this fixture.

This is a new ballast I picked up at the big box store down the street. And this is an electronic version to replace the magnetic version that came originally in the lamp.

Before starting a project like this, if the fixture is wired into the circuit, make sure the power is turned off.

Or simply unplug the fixture if it's plugged in.

In this model of fixture, I have these little clips that hold the cover on. Some models have screws that you have to remove. But, in this case, all I have to do is a 90 degree turn and the cover comes right off.

Ok. I've got everything buttoned back up. The lights are in. The power is turned on. And we'll flip the switch and see what happens. Yay! They work. Brilliant.

That's pretty much it for this job. The proof will be in about eight months or so to see if the lights are still bright and the hum's still gone. But, I've done this before on other fixtures and it's worked pretty well. So I have pretty hight confidence that it'll work.

So, until next time, go make something. It doesn't have to be perfect, just have fun.

How to make a "super" extension cord (aka power distribution box)

Description

This is an overview of a recent project making a "super" extension cord. It's a multiple outlet box for "wall wart" power supplies, battery chargers and the like. It's intended for low amperage devices.

Transcript

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-It-Yourselfers. Harley here.

My wife has this pile of miscellaneous chargers and wall warts and things that need to be plugged in and she only has one outlet. It's kind of a mess to be changing things back and forth. It's a messy pile; she doesn't know what to do with it. She came to me the other day and asked if I could help her find a solution.

We went to some home improvement stores looking for power strips and found some. Umm, nothing that really worked… that we thought would work well with what we thought we needed in terms of count and spacing and that kind of stuff.

So, I had some materials left over, some outlets, some romex, some wire nuts, some wood, and uh, from previous projects, and decided I'd try to make something. I talked to her about all the things she wanted to plug into it, where she wanted to put it, kind of basic specifications, requirements, types of things and started to work.

And then I took some scrap wood and make this box. The sides are made out of particle board. The top and bottom are MDF. The back is plywood. The dimensions are based on what she needed and constrained by what I had on hand. It was looking a little bit rough, so I put a couple coats of black spray paint on it and to try to dress it up a bit.

I picked up some 3/4 by 3/4 by 1/8 inch angle aluminum and made some brackets for each row. I drilled holes where I wanted the outlets and switches. And did a test on these supposedly self-tapping screws on some scrap material. It worked fine. I started driving it into this material and it promptly broke off. I got a punch and punched it out and a tap and then tapped all the holes and everything worked fine then. I think this material was a little thicker than my test material and it was just too thick for the self-taping screws. We've got switches for each row to be able to switch them on and off independently of each other and a pilot light to tell you when it's on or off.

So the next step was to wire everything together. And we'll flip this over and take a look at how that works.

So these three lines come from the plug. The white one goes to the switch for the pilot light and then around to the white side for each of the outlets. The black line comes up to the unswitched side of the switch and another black line comes from the switched side to the black side of the outlets. We have the copper line that comes into all the green screws for the ground circuit.

Each outlet in the row is simply daisy chained to the one before it. White goes to white. And black goes to black. And ground is simply looped around the green screws. Starting at the switch and all the way down to the end.

Now that I've shown you the physical wiring, let's look at a schematic diagram. There are three items in this device: the plug, switches with pilot lights, and outlets. Starting with the plug, we have hot, neutral and ground lines. The hot is black. Neutral is white. And ground is uninsulated copper. The ground simply goes from one device to the next, connecting to the green screws. The neutral goes first to the pilot lights and then to the neutral side of each of the outlets. Next the hot goes to the switch. This switch with the pilot light can be setup in several different configurations. In a future video, I plan to show some of the different ways this switch can be used, but for the purposes of this project I want the light to come on when the switch is turned on so I'm going to use the default configuration here. The hot line goes to the unswitched side of the plug that's not connected to the light. Then I connect the switched hot side from the switch to each of the outlets in succession. This means there's no power coming from the hot side when the switch is off. When it's on, power flows to both the pilot light and the outlets.

After I wired everything together, I needed to make a cover for the front. I did this out of some 26 gauge sheet metal and just cut 10 square holes for the outlets and switches. In order to do this I used three cutting tools. First of all I used the standard, kind of scissors style aviation shears; typical of what you use most often for cutting metal. Then I also used some dual edged cutting nibblers, shears, it's gone by a couple different names I've heard. And finally I used some nibblers to really clean up the edges and get some precision cuts.

First, using a fine tipped permanent marker, a tape measure and combination square, I laid out lines for the holes.

Next I created a starter hole simply by using a large screwdriver as a punch.

Then I opened up the hole with the metal snips.

Now with the larger hole, I could use the dual edged snips to cut out the majority of the hole. I'd not heard of this type of cutter until several weeks ago. It worked well to cut out from the middle of the sheet. and there's no curl in the metal afterward like there is with standard scissor-style snips. However, they don't work well on an edge if there's not enough support. Also, they have a kerf of about an eighth of an inch that you have to take into consideration when doing your layout.

After cutting out the majority of the hole, I went back to snips for a bit of touch up.

Final clean-up was done with a nibbler. These are like tiny shears that punch out a small strip about a sixteenth of an inch by an eighth of an inch. They can be very precise, but since they don't take off much material, it take awhile to make cuts of any length.

The plan was to put some pop rivets in here on each rail in between each of the outlets in order to hold the sheet metal to the assembly underneath. But after putting in the cover plates, I find it's not going to go anywhere. It's really solid. And, if I just leave it the way it is, it's a whole lot easier to assemble, and if I ever need to take it apart in the future, it'll be much easier to, take apart and make any changes if I need to.

One thing I found after I put the cover plates on, there are a couple places where either I mis-measured or I cut too, too wide of the line, or something, or there's enough variation in the manufacturing of the cover plates and switches and all, that I have a couple places where I have a little bit of the sheet metal line coming through. I'm not real wild about that, but such is it in hacks.

So I drilled a hole here for the, cord to come through and vacuumed everything out and put a wire tie on the cord to act as a strain relief so it doesn't pull back out and put pressure on the ends of the wire.

If you don't have one of these and you do anything at all with wire ties, they're really handy. They're called a "zip tie gun." And they're like I think less than $10 at Lowe's or Home Depot and they work really well. You put the zip tie in here and just kind of pull, it cranks down, pulls everything tight, and there's also a little cutter in there so while you have it pulled tight, you can kind of twist, and it cuts it all off. It works really well if you have to do anything of any real significance with zip ties. One thing I have found though is with these really large zip ties, the cutter cuts really kind of too close and they have a tendency to pop off. So on this particular one I just used a pair of diagonal cutters and cut it, left about an eighth of an inch here on the end.

The next step is to kind of wire tie everything together with wire nuts and then we'll assemble the top and put on… we'll assemble the top and attach it permanently to the box.

Ok. So I wire nutted the solid core wire coming from the rest of the box to the stranded core wire coming from the plug. And just kind of wire tied all three of these together. The green to the copper. The white to the white and the black to the black. A couple things to keep in mind when using wire ties, particularly with stranded and solid core wire; the stranded wire wants to wrap around the solid core and so you need to strip off more length on the stranded than you have on the solid core. And then as you're tightening them down, you want to be tugging on each wire individually and the cap as a whole to make sure you have a good solid connection in there and that nothings going to come apart on you. Once it's put together though, I've never had these things work their way loose. They stay tight until you intentionally take them apart.

Ok. To hold the top on I got some angle aluminum to… that will go along the edges. One side of this is one half inch and the other side is three-quarter inch. I'd gotten some equal sided aluminum before and found that I didn't have enough clearance on the front with the face plate on here. So I went back and got some that had different lengths on the edges. But I think that… I'll put some screws in on the sides on the long side and I think that'll hold that on there nicely.

Got the edges on to hold the front on; got some trim pieces on it; eased the edges with a file so they're not quite so sharp; added a handle, some feet. I think we're ready to give this a try.

I have it plugged in. There's no smoke. The lights are still on. I think we're good. Although the switches are all off. I don't have any initial shorts anyway. So I'm going to give this thing a test.

I've got this little device here. I don't know what they're called but you can pick them up at home improvement stores and I'd be surprised if they're more than twenty bucks. They're really cheap. But they're really handy when you're working with 110 electrical outlets. They've got three lights on them and they have one pattern that shows up when it's correct and five different patterns for five different error conditions like open ground, open neutral, hot ground reverse, those types of things. Very handy if you're buying a house and you want to check, you should check your outlets before you buy, so when you make an offer you can put conditions on it if there's anything wrong, you can have it fixed. If you're doing your own electrical wiring you can check it. That type of thing. For this I'll use it to check my wiring in the box.

It's real simple, you just kind of plug it in and turn it on and viola, we have two lights that indicates correct. And to kind of verify I didn't get anything reversed as I went down the line, I'll plug it in to the last one and we still have to green, uh, orange ones indicating correct. Awesome. And we'll try the bottom one and turn it on. And correct. And turn this one on and it's correct. So, I'm assuming everything else is probably ok. I mean I could have something reversed and then reversed back, but, eh, I'm not going to worry with it. The pilot lights all come on. If we turn everything off, we should not have anything, and we don't. So I… hey… I think everything's good, this is looking great. Time to go install it.

There we go. We've got room for battery chargers. Other battery chargers. Wall warts. Expansion room. Places to put other things that aren't right here. Overall I think it'll work well. So until next time, go make something.