Wondering about installing lights for sewing room? Is your craft room lighting in need of an upgrade? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows how to upgrade sewing room lights for a massive improvement. Adding several LED lights in room improved the overall usefulness of the sewing space and for craft work.
Check out Diane's channel Delightful Light: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqeC5EK8VMuFCK5t268H4eA/videos
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, you may subscribe here.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Mining by Moonlight," "Motivator," "Rocket," "Chipper"
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.
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.
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.
Are you interested in how to design DIY sequential turn signals? In this episode of House of Hacks, Harley shows a unique design using a couple components to create a tail light sequencer circuit.
Are you interested in making things around the home and shop? You’ve found the right place. Here at the House of Hacks, we do tutorials, project overviews, tool reviews and more. 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.
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: Hot Swing
Transcript
Interested in sequential turn signal indicators?
Today at the House of Hacks we'll be looking at exactly that.
[Introduction]
Hi! Harley here.
I have a car that has three tail lights on each side and the manufacturer has those coming on all at the same time, for both brakes and turn signal indicators.
And I thought I'd be cool to change that so it would be sequential turn indicators. Kind of like the old Cougars and Mustangs had.
There's a lot of ways you could design a circuit like this.
I believe the old Cougars, and probably the Mustangs too for that matter, had mechanical switches that had a motor driven swiper on them.
And so as that swiper turned, it would have different contacts that would turn the lights on in sequence.
You could also use various timer circuits from RC circuits to 555 timers to anything else that you really wanted to to provide a timing mechanism and then use either transistors or logic circuits to control the sequence turning on.
And of course you could also use micro-controllers like a PIC or an Arduino to accomplish the same task.
When I first started thinking about this project a number of decades ago, a friend of mine, Robert Largent, suggested using an EPROM to store the different patterns in and just use a timer to increment the bottom two address lines and then use higher address lines to switch between Brake, Left, Right indicators.
I built the circuit and it worked great and I've had it sitting around in a box until I get around to rebuilding that car.
I'm a member of a Facebook electronics design group and somebody asked a question, in kind of an ambiguous manner, about LEDs and EPROMs and it reminded me of this project, so I went and dug it out of the box.
This is really just going to be a design overview. I'm not going to go into the details of constructing the circuit or the schematics, but I will talk about it on a block level diagram perspective.
Let's take a closer look at this.
OK. Let's talk about EPROMs for a minute.
There's two types of EPROM. There's serial EPROMs and parallel EPROMs.
The serial ones are designed for serial interfaces, particularly with micro-controllers and things like that and they don't lend themselves to this project.
This project uses parallel EPROMs which are characterized by having multiple address lines coming in and multiple data lines coming out.
Usually you have eight data lines out and any number of address lines going in depending on the size of the EPROM.
Typically we think about an EPROM as you give it an address and you get data out.
Another way of looking at it, which is kind of the same thing, but a little bit different, is you have status inputs and you have status outputs.
It's really kind of the same thing but it's looking at it from a slightly different perspective.
Instead of looking at it through a sequential address space thing like a computer would normally use it, you're looking at it from a input mapping to an output table perspective.
And that's how this project approaches it.
You need an EPROM that has at least five data lines. In this particular case I think it has eight for 256 memory locations.
(I'm not positive on that.)
And you also, for this particular project, need at least six data lines.
I think all of them have a minimum of eight data lines because that's just kind of the typical size of a byte for a computer, so you usually don't have to worry about the data output side, it's more the address input side, depending on the memory size.
The way I have this EPROM setup is there are multiple blocks of four groups.
The four groups correspond to the Off state, the 1 LED state, the 2 LED state and the 3 LED state.
And those four states are just replicated for each of the combinations of Right turn, Left turn and Brake that are possible.
OK, so let's look at the circuit itself.
It's really broken up into a couple different sections.
Power can be 12 volts in a car system normally and the logic circuit needs to run on 5 volts. So we have a little 5 volt regulator here to power the circuit with.
And then we have three input lines. Again, the car is typically 12 volts and it's easiest if we deal with 12 volts on the input side coming from all the switches so we don't have to have 5 volt regulation anywhere else in the car.
So we have red is Right, black is Brake and green is Left turn indicators. All those can be up to 12 volts and then we have a little bit of conditioning circuitry here to drop that to 5 volts.
That's going into the address lines for the EPROM, this large chip being the EPROM. Those are going into the A2, 3 and 4 lines for the EPROM.
Then we have a 555 timer here that is adjustable. It has a little rheostat that I can adjust the timing on.
And it's going into a binary counter. So the binary counter has a clock that's going up and down and it just counts the pulses on that.
So this will convert the clocked pulses into a number that corresponds to 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, it'll actually count up to... I'm not sure how high this particular chip counts, but it counts up to a certain point and then it rolls over and starts back at zero.
Since we're only dealing with two bits to count from zero to three, which gives us our four states for our three lights, we really only care about two of those output lines.
If you put it on output bits 0 and 1 and connect that to address lines 0 and 1, you'll run this clock at the same speed as the 555 timer.
If you change your output bits that you're using on your counter from the bottom two, every time you shift up one output, you're dividing the speed of your counter by two.
So it's easy to get divisions of two on your timer, but then you can also adjust your timer speed, so you have lots of flexibility in terms of how fast this thing cycles through your bottom four bits.
Then we have the bottom six bits of the memory going over to this other board which is basically just designed for high current switching.
It's going into a buffer over here which will eventually be connected to transistors so we're not driving the transistors directly from the EPROM but we're buffering it through a device that can handle that kind of switching more easily.
Then I also have the outputs of this buffer going to these LEDs with some current limiting resistors over here so we can just kind of see the status of that.
Ideally in the future I'll put some transistors along this section that will then control the incandescent lights in the car, if I so choose that way, or I might drive a high-current LED panel to get a little bit more modern look to it.
That's the basic overall system design.
You can see right now I have it setup with the Brake and the Left turn indicator going.
If I disconnect the Brake, now we just have the turn indicator.
If there's nothing going, we have nothing.
We can look at the right turn indicator if I connect that here.
We have just Brakes only, they all come on.
Then if I connect both the turn indicators, we can see the hazard conditions.
Now the interesting thing about this... most cars when you have hazards on and you have brakes, you get one of two conditions. Either it's designed so you get just the hazards and the brake is ignored. Or you get brakes and hazards are ignored. But you don't really have a state indicating both brakes and hazards.
Now with this design, you can actually put anything in those memory spots you want to get any kind of pattern.
In this particular case, I've set it up so that when you have hazards and brakes combined, you actually get all the lights blinking on and off, which is different than hazards or brakes, either one by itself.
So that gives you a little bit more flexibility in this design.
You could also have it setup so that the lights alternate back and forth or any other type of pattern that you want besides just this.
So I happened to choose all blinking like this for that case but you could do anything you want.
But the point being it can be separate from the hazard case and the brake case, which is a little bit different than standard sequential light circuits.
I hope you found this design overview interesting and if you're interested in electronics and photography, wood working, metal working and other shop related projects, I encourage you to subscribe and click the bell notification icon and YouTube will let you know next time I release a video.
A pair of momentary switches become a latching on/off switch as Harley expands on a previous video about remote controlling a shop vac. This is the first of several in a modular switching system to remote control shop equipment using the PowerSwitch Tail II.
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 introduce a modular system to allow different types of switches to be used to control the shop vac (or any other type of appliance).
Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Special effects: livingroom_light_switch by AlienXXX at http://freesound.com
Transcript
Last year I showed an easy way to remote control shop equipment using a PowerSwitch Tail, a couple batteries, a switch and some wire.
Today at the House of Hacks I’m going to show how I made a push-on/push-off switch that mimics the way a lot of shop equipment are controlled.
[Music]
Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.
Just a quick reminder, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the House of Hacks channel to get notified of future videos.
Last year I made a video responding to a comment by Rob about how I made the remote control switch on my central shop vac system.
In that video, I showed the core design element: the PowerSwitch Tail and how to use it with a simple battery operated switch.
Today i’m going to show a different way to control the same PowerSwitch Tail by eliminating the batteries and using a switch with two buttons: one to turn the tool on and one to turn it off.
This is similar to how many shop tools are controlled. It also has the additional feature of being able to be expanded upon in the future.
If you recall, the PowerSwitch Tail requires 3 to 12 volts DC applied to these two connectors to cause the tool to turn on.
Batteries are of course one source of power for this but they need to be replaced on occasion.
Since I didn’t want to deal with replacing batteries, in my application I decided to use a surplus wall wart style power supply. I had a bunch of these lying around and figured this would be a good application for one of them.
I plugged it into the same outlet I plug the PowerSwitch Tail into.
I connect the low voltage power supply to two connectors on an RJ-11 jack.
Then I connect the other two connectors on the RJ-11 jack to the two connectors on the PowerSwitch Tail.
This allows me to use a phone wire as an extension cord.
For the switch's end, I put another RJ-11 jack in a project box. This project box can now have any type of switch mechanism in it I want and provides a nice modular way to use different types of switches.
For example, I could put in a toggle switch just like I showed in the last video.
Simply wire the negative side of the power to the negative input on the PowerSwitch Tail and wire a switch between the positive side of the power and the positive input for the PowerSwitch Tail.
However, since we have power in the project box, we aren’t limited to just a simple mechanical switch.
We can build circuitry that controls the PowerSwitch Tail.
The first thing I’ve made is a simple latching switch.
Similar to the switches on many tools, like my drill press and my bandsaw, I press the green button to turn on my vacuum and push the red button to turn it off.
Inside the box is a simple flip flop.
A flip flop is a type of circuit with two inputs, called Set and Reset. It also has two outputs, called Q and bar Q, or also known as not Q. It’s just the inverse of Q.
The inputs receive momentary pulses.
If the pulse is on Set, then Q goes high and bar Q goes low.
If the pulse is on Reset, then Q goes low and bar Q goes high.
If we consider just one output, Q, we can see Set causes it to turn on and Reset causes it to turn off. It just flip flops between the two positions.
Flip flops can be made with a variety of different circuits ranging from discrete components to various types of integrated circuits.
I happened to have a Quad 2-Input NOR gate chip in my parts bin so I used that.
But I could just as easily have used NAND gates, a chip with a dedicated flip-flop circuit in it, or a couple of transistors and resistors.
Once I had the circuit built, all I had to do was put it in the box and wire it up.
The switches are wired with pull down resistors. This allows the inputs to be normally low and go high when the button is pressed.
The green button connects to the Set input. The red button connects to the Reset input.
The negative input to the PowerTail Switch goes to the negative power connector.
Since I’m switching the positive side of the power, I’m using a PNP transistor.
Its base connects to the flip-flops Q output.
The PowerSwitch Tail’s positive input goes to the transistor’s collector.
And finally, the transistor’s emitter connects to the positive power connector.
In this configuration, the transistor acts as the switch for the PowerSwitch Tail’s power.
When it’s all put together, pushing the green button turns on the appliance and pushing the red button turns it off.
Since this switch system is modular, I have plans to build other switches too.
The next one is a current sensing switch so the vacuum will automatically turn on when a tool is in use and will turn off, after a short time delay, when the tool is turned off.
I’d love to know in the comments below if the level of detail I presented here was too much, just right or too little.
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 technical or mechanical 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, photography, electronics, like in this video, 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!
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.
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!
