Blinking lights! Yes, the first prototype of the first stage relay setup for my home made autostart is assembled. As you know, a small 3 to 5 vdc BlueFruit Feather can’t crank an engine starter. That’s just too much current to flow through such a small board. To make this work, I have to step up through relays in stages to get to the big relays that can actually do the work.
So, stage 1 relays are actually Latching Relay Featherwings that are joined to the BlueFruit feather via soldered wire connections. These latching connections only need about 10ms of signal to turn on or off the 3.3 vdc relays, which will hold the 12 vdc power supply to the stage 2 relays.
The stage 2 relays will then use minimal current at 12 vdc to drive the vehicle relays that actually engage things like the key on and cranking power. Don’t worry, at the end of the project I will follow this up with a diagram and parts list. Looks like the overall price is about $60 worth of material, pending finding a used container or box for free.
Linux – keep it simple.