Tuesday, September 27, 2011

A4000: Custom circuit for Auto AGA/RTG switch

Hey my friends,

It's not have been a long time since my previous post but trust me... I was waiting some things to arrive alas I couldn't write without having stuff in my hands :)

Anyway, since a long time I was wondering what I was gonna do with the manual switch that Ratte's Auto AGA/RTG switch had. Don't get me wrong I love my Auto switch but I really dislike the classic stick switches.
Sadly On/Off/On switches don't have a great variety and for a round one... the smallest I could find had a diameter of 21mm which is really big to mount.
Then it struck me... Why wouldn't I put an awesome momentary Push-On switch that has an embedded LED on it and mount it on the obsolete position if the keylock switch???

Well I ordered the switch and voila... IT REALLY fits like a glove...







In the previous photos I just supplied voltage to the LED to test it out.

So... I had the switch... so now I needed the circuit that would make my Push-On click... to transform to On/Off/On states (and loop back). I made a thread on Amibay about it but on the meantime I asked a good electronic friend of mine (Mike) to bring an idea about that.
After searching a bit he told me he has done something similar in the past with an CD4017 IC. After getting the PinOuts we designed a circuit that was simple enough.
The IC used was indeed an CD4017 that has 10 outputs. Since I only wanted 3 outputs (On/Off/On) we fed the 4th output into the RESET on IC so it loops back to the start once the 3 output switches :)



You can check it out in case you wanna try something like this in the future :)
So... after getting the parts that was needed, and after 2-3 hours of assembling the prototype board, there was it. You can see the sockets for the IC and the relays plus the headers.





I soldered a couple of LEDS to female headers to be able to try out the output LEDS on the PCB




...and the first TEST (after some troubleshooting) was successful!!!
  • Left LED = ON
  • No LED = OFF
  • Right LED = ON
 


Since everything worked fine, I needed to cut the remaining unused veroboard and mount the PCB inside A4000's faceplate :)



I used some dual foamy sticky tape that insulated and hold the veroboard solid as a rock inside A4000's faceplate. Wires from Push-On button on header plus a custom Molex to Fan+12V power for my PCB was made :)





And that's about it!!!

Because I'm sure you're pretty weird how that thing works... how about a little video about it?
(I'm also testing Line-In of Delfina because some peepz requested it).



Enjoy :)


Edit:
You can check out also a really clever and nice implementation using Arduino by my Amiga friend Claes. Check out his solution on his blog here.

4 comments:

Ritcho said...

Simply incredibly!!!
I have no words!!!
Congratulations my friend.
From now, following your blog.
Best Regards,
Ritcho/RJ - Brazil

mfilos said...

Thanks for your good words Ritcho mate. :)

Carles Bernardez Noheras said...

I have more or less the same setup. I need one of this switchers ! :)
Its possible to buy them?

mfilos said...

@Carles Bernandez Noheras
Sadly you can't buy them but there is a thread @ A1k.org that has all the info to make one on your own :)
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?p=417467