So having had discussions with several members about issues with the ledwiz and power consumption, I've decided to design an interface board for supplying more power for the toys in our cabs.
My thought is to use optocouplers to trigger some mosfets for supplying a greater amount of current for the high power toys (shaker motor, gear motor, cree leds) and using darlington array chips like those that are on the board already in a bridged mode (500ma becomes 1A).
The advantages of this design would be:
1: ledwiz only needs run on 5v, output from the booster can be set to 5, 7, 9, 12, 24, 48 volt as needed
2: ledwiz runs cool and well below load capacity
3: by selecting the input by jumper you could easily switch to an arduino as a controller without rewiring your whole cab to + switching
I've got some prototype boards on the way for testing this idea, my question is "would there be an interest in the community for this?"
We're basically talking about a replacement for mechanical relays here, only using circuits to do the switching, making it faster and more reliable.
Links to final documentation for System boards:
https://dl.dropbox.c...nstructions.zip
Edited by zebulon, 17 December 2012 - 03:34 AM.