I have been trying to mimic an "extra channel" on my P3P so I can switch off and on lights or any other mods I may have on the bird. I had a mercury switch on the gimbal but was never crazy about it. My latest attempt was to add a relay to trigger off of when the front red LED's are on. Simple enough right? Well no, not really. It turns out that the front LED's run on ~4.3volts and all I had in my junk pile of parts (I have a lot of stuff) was 12v relays. Radio Shack as always didn't have anything useful, so I ordered a pack of ten 5v relays (cheap as 1, really) from Amazon and waited 2 days for them to come. It turns out that the power to the LED's is so weak it cannot even turn on the relay with the LED's connected or not. It is really weak. I don't know if I have a meter problem but the amperage of the LED's is about 0.15 milliamps. Yes .15, almost nothing. I already have a nice jack on the side of my bird now for a remote NC or NO remote plug to go in using a mini headphone jack. I also went ahead and added a battery power port using the regular sized headphone jack plug as well. So the power plug is nice but I really wanted a way to remote switch my 100watt LED, disco light, etc. remotely. I think the next thing may be a light sensing circuit but that gets complicated. Any better ideas?
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