Good Evening All, I am in the process of putting my Wisconsin's internal systems. I want to run the bilge pump in conjuction with a water sensing start circuit. I am sure that someone has already designed the circuit. Would anyone have a diagram if this type of circuit? Thanks in advance. Ken
I agree with Bob--they can be a bit wonky. Since you are building a big-gun boat, you will want a radio that has knobs for rotate. Those radios usually are seven channels or more. You should have a channel to spare for the pump switch. That said, if you really have your heart set on one, NTXBG has a schematic on their website: ntxbg.org/tikiwiki/tiki-featured_link.php
Thanks Bob and Dustin. I am not set one way or the other. I wanted to look at a schematic diagram to see how painful it would be to build. I may just use a servo to turn the pump on. I don't want the pump to be just free running. I will keep y'all abreast on the decision.
I think Strike was working on (or had completed and was testing, not sure) a manu-matic pump switch. It could be off, on, or automatic. Most of the time automatic would be used, but the captain can turn it on to check the pumps or turn it off to save power or clear a priming failure (or scuttle the ship to prevent additional damage points).
I talked with Stephen Morgret last night. It was not anything that he had a diagram of. He indicated that I would probably be able to find something online.
In lieu of using a servo to manually depress a switch to power the pump, a few of us have gone solid state to take the servo (fail point) out of the pump control circuit. An electronic switch such as Delta or Turnigy is used to turn on a sealed relay which in turns sends power to the pump motor. I've yet to have one of these fail since switching to them two years ago. Personally, I do not like the "Auto Fail" automatic pump switch. Some people have used them sucessfully. I haven't. Also seen others that haven't. The circut seems to have a tendacy to turn on late or never. I would rather forget to turn on a pump and sink than sink because of a mechanical failure by an auto-switch.
Look at theknowledge base on the ntxbg.org website. The best functioning auto pump circuit I have seen in that of Jeff Burns. He has gone gone through 4 versions or so. He sets his up right so that it wont come on till the pump is fully primed. If I remember correctly he is an "egghead" engineer for Cisco systems. I watched him pick up wifi on his PDA from 2 miles away or so using a Pringles can back in 2004 or so. His circuit is a combo of a TIP-120? some misc. diodes or resistors and a relay. I had one in my Dunkerque that primed properly every single time... not one issue. Das Butts
I have built three. Two worked very reliably. The other only worked occasionally. One has been in the cruiser for years and is regularly run by captains with limited experience.
There are a bunch of designs, just google it. The heart of the one I've built is an NPN transistor which pulls a pin on the microcontroller high when there is continuity across the base and the collector. The microcontroller controls the ESC which runs the pump motor. Of course if you use a brushed motor for the pump you can use a simple relay instead of the microcontroller/ESC combo. Heck even with brushless you could setup a 555 timer to drive the ESC if you really wanted to but the microcontroller is cheap/simple and you can add additional inputs easily or have it run specialized code etc... It wouldn't be that hard to put a microcontroller based auto-switch inline with the TD board control signal that a lot of guys use to allow for an auto pump with manual override. Lots of options
