Relay Board 2010

chaosgk

For those of you who were following·my original·relay board thread that started about this time last year, I wanted to post a new update and a quick review of this project.
Purpose:· Design a pyrotechnics firing system with intergrated audio and electric match testing capability using a master/slave setup.

Setup:··
Master Control Board;·· 16 channels out using quad line drivers to connect to slave relay boards.·· Driven by a propmod designed by mctrivia.
Slave Relay Board:·· 56 relays per board all connected to 7 tpic6595 chips.
Total Channels:· 896

So far Kwinn has his copy of the master controller working with the two slaves I provided him,· I have my master board working, except for some bad traces on the board from the manufacturer so I will need to build two new master boards instead of just one so I have a spare.

The slaves are working so far, I just completed my first full slave board, fully populated with all status lights and relays and have tested the electric matches and am yet to get a relay to fuse.
I had a couple of design flaws on my part when I drew up the PCB layout that are a slight pain in the butt.· I missed a trace that is about 2mm from a resistor to a LED on relay #2 for each group of relays so they have to be manually soldered with a jump wire.· I also missed a trace on the master board, but a simple jump wire took care of that as well.


Now I just need to find a good source for boxes to put these things in with clear lids.· If anyone has any ideas that would work, the boards are roughly 6"x10".
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WBA Consulting

Interesting project. Sounds like you need a flame proof case..... The size of this one might work and is NEMA rated with a UL94-HB flame rating. They also carry NEMA rated cable glands to go with it.

www.polycase.com/item/wc-35.html

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Andrew Williams
WBA Consulting
WBA-TH1M Sensirion SHT11 Module
Special Olympics Polar Bear Plunge, Mar 20, 2010

mctrivia

shock resistance would be more important then flame resistance. there should be little chance of fire by the controler but never a bad safety.

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24 bit LCD Breakout Board now in. $24.99 has backlight driver and touch sensitive decoder.

If you have not already. Add yourself to the prophead map

bill190

In the industrial electrical world, they have what is called a circuit breaker "lock out" "tag out" system (LOTO).

Someone working on a machine can turn off a circuit breaker and install his own pad lock for which he only has the key. Then he can safely work on that machine without someone accidentally turning on the circuit breaker.

Might want to consider something like that. Here is some info...

http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/electric_power/hazardous_energy_control.html

chaosgk

I actually found some injection moulded boxes locally that are about the right size that I can easily modify for my purposes and will fit under my cnc machine to let me cut out all of the holes I need for the ports so I will be going with that route I think.· We don't have it in the budget for 16 cases at $33 each for those that you guys posted.

As an update to the project, we have sucessfully tested the master with one of the slaves and have built 5 more slaves this weekend that just need the relays soldered in place and they will be ready to test.· So far things are going very smoothly. I'm waiting for a couple of propmodules from mctrivia to show up, hopefully this week so I can do more testing with the software and we have another 7 slaves to solder up which is a task in itself considering there are more then 1000 solder points on each one and we hope to have at least 12 ready to go, possibly more. I haven't told my partners yet, but I would like at least 18 of them ready to go, but at about 4 hours each to build, I don't think they are going to like to hear how many I actually want.· I'd like to be able run a full 16 slave setup so I can put out as many firing points as we can.

Thanks for the links on the boxes.



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