I want to create a light box for my son's little league, with three green lights for balls, two yellow lights for strikes and two red lights for outs. Each light needs to be on a seperate switch, but the whole shebang will be wired together. Can anyone give me advice on how to wire these all together? Thanks!
This is where I am supposed to tell you to hire an electrician before you kill yourself, the whole team and all the spectators. ;-)
Wire one side of the battery to one side of all the switches, the other side of the battery to one side of all the lights and then connect one switch and one light together with the unused terminals.
The answer below is entirely correct and very nicely stated, but I will add one additional step to respond to your specific request for the multiple lights.....
When connecting "one switch and one light together" per the instructions below, you actually need to connect the green switch's unused terminal to the unused terminal on each of the 3 green lights, then connect the yellow switch's unused terminal to the unused terminal on each of the 2 yellow lights, and finally the last switch, red's unused terminal, to the unused terminal on each of each of 2 red lights.
Hope this helps you.
Smarty
Boy that sounds awfully complicated. :)
Terry,
I agree entirely.
I drew up a schematic and emailed it to the original poster ( snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net). This is a lot easier to follow than a text description of the wiring.
Smarty
Either you weren't clear or you've never played baseball. :)
Better: you actually need to connect [each] green switch's unused terminal to the unused terminal on each of the 3 green lights, then connect [each] yellow switch's unused terminal to the unused terminal on each of the 2 yellow lights, and finally the last [set of] switch[es], [each] red's unused terminal, to the unused terminal on each of each of 2 red lights. One light per switch.
Maybe there would be some use for a master switch also, that would turn them all off, but I can't think of one. Like during commericals or disputes with the umpire, but the latter one doesn't seem like a reason to turn the lights off..
mm,
Your wording is better than mine. I struggled with the best way to state the details, and eventually drew up a schematic / wiring diagram and mailed it directly to the original poster since his email address with publicly shown. It is much simpler to follow the diagram than it is to describe it in words.
I am reminded of the challenge I was once given by an English teacher:
Describe in writing a helix without using either a drawing or your hands to illustrate......
Smarty
You should upload the drawing to Tinypic.com. It will give you a link to post here.
We were challenged to describe a spiral staircase (similar to your helix) and an accordian.
Charlie
Definitely. We had a 5-minute assignment in high school English to pick a machine and describe how it works. I think I used a can opener. I felt so-so after I spoke my part.
The guy after me used a key cylinder, the innards of which I didn't know. After he was done, I did know how it worked. And I felt pretty humiliated by my crummy explantation, which I had to admit probably didn't explain anything to anyone who hadn't already seen one.
That will probably take me years.
I'm glad you've played baseball. :)
Are these English teachers in some big conspiracy to teach us something?
The three R's are reading riting and rithmetic. Don't say nothin about talking.
Superb suggestion Terry!!! I never knew this existed. Here is the link to my schematic:
Smarty
I still don't follow what you are using for switches. I would expect someone to use single pole switches. Single pole switches don't have any unused outputs.
What type switches are you suggesting?
I use a program called TinyCad. It is free and pretty easy to use.
Terry,
Each of my 3 switches is a single pole single throw (SPST) switch with ***no unused terminals". These switches (red, green, yellow) control the red, green, and yellow bulbs. The bulbs have a common bus fed directly from the power source on one of their 2 leads, and have switched power to their remaining leads. The red bulbs, for example, are illuminated when the corresponding switch is closed.
The common bus connecting all of the bulbs on one side to the power source is at the extreme far right edge of the drawing, and appears to be nearly clipped off when viewed on the web site. The uploaded picture shows the line a bit more clearly, but perhaps it is harder for you to recognize it because of the way the image gets a slight amount of cropping, JPEG compression, or both.
Smarty
Smarty
Where do you live? You don't live in the USA, Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, or Japan, do you?
Hexix: A curve described by the parametric equation
x = cos(t) y = sin(t) z = t
where t ranges over the real numbers, or any curve that results from a rotation, translation, reflection, or change of scale of another helix.
Beautiful! Precise, succinct, mathematically accurate. Minor nit....use of "helix" in definition's final phrase "scale of another helix" might cause my English teacher to challenge the recursive reference. I also resorted to a little Google help on this one and came up with this:
"A helix is nothing more than the shape of a screw" and leave the rest up to the imagination......
I might as well be from a different solar system when it comes to baseball. I guess I much prefer individual competition....car racing, boxing, martial arts, Olympic wrestling, and those types of things rather than organized teams as played here in the U.S. I just find the whole business of "major league" and NFL to be so much big business.... and so little true sport.......I guess I would call it "the Steinbrenner effect".....
Smarty
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