Bruder Piggyback Forklift

[Zabco]

Originally Posted by dremu

Apologies, one of these days I'll learn to check for previous experience before I go frothing off at the mouth. Might be a little Arduino happy :|

Wrt the current limit, though, I just drive one LED per pin, and haven't had any trouble at 20mA. Cuts down on component count, but as you say, room is still at a premium. I know Adafruit has their Trinket line that are tiny, or maybe you could just use a bare '328 chip, but then you need a voltage regulator and at least a connection to program it ... ugh.

Anyway, I'll stop going off topic, and just say wow. I'm particularly interested in the limit switches as I wanna do something similar for a telescoping column for another project and I have a box of those very switches awaiting the time and work.

-- A

No problem with me. Thinking back I don't think I've posted a build that uses an arduino or other microprocessor so you wouldn't have found anything anyway. And your info might be of use to others who are not familiar with arduinos.

I love Adafruit, they are a great company to deal with. I use a lot of their components. I really like that they are in the US and manufacture a lot of what they sell in house.

With the limit switches you just have to pay attention to polarity of diodes, as apparently I did not as noted in last post. For those not familiar with these limit circuits I should have mentioned also that these types of switches have both a Normal Open (NO) and a Normal Closed (NC) circuit which is usually shown on the side of the switch right above the pins. There are usually 3 pins or lugs for wiring, one is a common, one for the NO circuit and one for the NC circuit. For limiting motion of motor drives we want to use the NC circuit. On the switches I used that is the outside two pins. I cut away the third pin to avoid confusion later and a small diode will fit nicely into the space left. There are numerous utube videos detailing how to make these circuits and how they work.