Once I installed the software on the Pi and booted it up they remained off, however as soon as i added the HAT rev 10 board in the hardware page they all went to on (high)
After a couple of hours of playing around and troubleshooting the issue I found the below:
If I set the logic to positive and supply 3.3v from GPIO17 (directly on the pi) to the VCC - instead of the normal 5V it will work, However i am finding this a bit strange and not very comfortable doing so as i would need to solder directly to the board and cant use the header. What is also strange is that if i use the header on the actual board, that is marked as GPIO17 it wont supply the voltage.
Another strange thing is that if i unplug the relay and leave only the GND and VCC plugged in, relay will go to low. As soon as i connect one of the relays it switches on immediately. To me this means that for some strange/unknown reason its supplying some signal/voltage (4.29v) constantly on the GPIOs 5/6/12/13 and cant seem to switch it off in any way.
Any help on the above will be greatly appreciated :) :)
I hope the above made a bit of sense, cause when I re read it, I actually managed to confuse myself haha
(Images of hardware below)
Don't know if you have the specs of the relay board but some of them works with VCC at 3v or 12v instead of 5v. According to your tests it seems it is working with VCC at 3v. Sorry if cannot help more but the automation board is designed for specific relay boards which are most common (and cheaper). One last thing, be careful to use the 3.3 volt from raspberry pin, once I shorted the pin to ground and destroyed the raspberry immediately. Regards, Angelo
I am not using the header directly in fact.... using cables and inverted the gnd and vcc - as you said they are the other way round.
GPIO17 is 3.3v just like GPIO1.
I think i will just connect to GPIO1 or 17 directly from the PI seems to work fine as i tested it quite a bit since i posted this.
Thanks a REAL lot for your prompt help
First of all, you cannot use the header of the automation board with this relay, VCC and ground are inverted. The small header of 6 pins of the board has the ground and 5v at the end pins of the connector. I don't understand what test you did with the gpio17, there is one pin of the raspberry which supply 3.3v so why you used gpio17? Whatever, forget the hydrosys4 board for the moment, if you connect the relay power to ground and VCC to 5v, what happen when you connect the relay input in1 to 3.3v and then to ground? Is it working? The 3.3v can be directly taken from raspberry pin, you can check the pinout.
I think it is better to understand more how these relays work. Can you power the relays with 5v and put in1 once to 3.3v and later to ground and describe how it behaves? As I can see there are this same type of relays working at 3v VCC and not at 5v. This might explain why with 3.3v it works.
Hi There, The system is setup to work with inverse logic which is most common for relays board. So when you set the hardwaresetting it will immediately put all the output high. Connect the relay and check if activating one relay in the setting will pull it off. To change the relay logic you just need to change the logic in the hardwaresetting. Let me know.