The project I'm working on is a boat lift. Right now you have to hold a knob on a drum switch to make the lift go up or down. I'm trying to take the drum switch out of the equation and use a remote control to operate the lift. The purpose of doing this is to make docking the boat much easier in rough water and essentially a one person job. I'm trying to do this for my parents to make it easier for them to use the boats at their lakehouse.
I've never posted here before so I'll try to give as much background as I can. I'm not electronic savy, but I'm not completly ignorant either, however, this project may prove that wrong.
The lake house is 2 hours away so I started the project without knowing what I was working with. For some reason I thought I knew how motors worked and bought stuff without researching. I bought a RF transmitter board that has 4 channels, each of which controls a small relay. I also bought two larger mechanical relays that are SPDT and are rated for 18 amps. The way I thought it would work was I would hook the channel 1 relay up to the first large relay and hook that to the "forward" wire on the motor. Similarly, I'd hook channel 2 up to the second large relay and make that control the "reverse" wire. So I was completely content with this theory until I got to the lakehouse and took the panel of the motor. At that point I realized that I didn't have a clue and "forward" and "reverse" are a little more complicated. Hopefully someone will be able to help me out.
The motor is a Magnetek Century AC motor. It's 3/4 hp and wired at 115 volts. As I said previously, it's controlled by a drum switch. At least thats what I believe the switch is called. I can provide more details about the motor as I copied down everything that was on the motor label.
The motor had a wiring diagram which didn't make much sense to me, or at least I didn't want to risk damaging the motor by guessing.
I'll try my best to describe the wiring diagram:
Low voltage:
Blue-------- -------- Red-------- ----Line -------- Orange---
White----- ---------- Black----- -------Line ---------- Yellow----
High Voltage:
Blue --------O-------Line
Orange White To reverse interchange red and black leads Red
Black------ --------Line Yellow-----
Now, I know it wasn't hooked up high voltage, but I didn't know if the red and black leads had anything to do with the low voltage. Also, I didn't what the low voltage diagram meant with the two lines, or if these were my "forward" and "reverse". To further confuse me the motor wasn't wired like the diagram. Here's how it was wired from the "drum switch". The drum switch had 5 wires coming into the motor. One was a ground so I'll omit that from my diagram. The left side are the wires that come from the drum switch and on the right are the motor wires.
White----------------------Black
-----------Orange Black----------- -----------Blue
-----------Yellow Orange-------- -----------White
Red------------------------Red
Since I got home and started researching I found a couple of things on H-bridges. However, most sites that mention them are using them on DC motors. The only site I could find that mentioned any thing about AC motors said something about using one SPDT and one DPDT to switch direction. However, the site didn't explain how to wire anything.
I'm going to start working on figuring out which wires the drum switch controls and try to mimick that with relays.
Hopefully someone can help.
Thanks - Doug