# Hmm..PIR and new Cowlacious boards problem?



## Death Wraith (Mar 23, 2006)

OK so I get my new boards in the mail today and when trying them out with a Parallax PIR I notice the pins are in different orders. The boards are built '+ - Sig' and the PIR is set-up '- + OUT'. Am I missing something? When I try it the board is constantly triggered by the PIR.

DW


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## hpropman (Jul 27, 2008)

You are correct it looks like the positive and negative are reversed from the board to the motion sensor. Did you get the motion sensor and cable from Cowlacious? If you have an multimeter check the cable the center and the left pin to see if they are reversed from one end of your cable to the other. If not then the center and the left pin (with the out on the right) need to be reversed on the one end or the other of the cable. Check to see if the motion sensor is working properly you can use this circuit in the picture below. when the unit detects motion the led should light. please let me know if you have any questions.









Click the image to see a larger version


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## Death Wraith (Mar 23, 2006)

I got with Carl on this. Seems like I've been bugging him 'to death' as I try to learn how this all works. Yes, you will need to make adjustments if you want to use a Parallax PIR with the new boards.

Here's his email:

Hi Art,



Our cable is in a different configuration as you noticed. I have not seen their cable, except in the web pic, but most connectors have a little tab the can be pushed in or gently lifted up and the wire assembly can then be gently pulled out and changed to a different slot. If that is not the case with their connectors, then we can sell you one of our cables at a reasonable cost and if we ship first class it won’t cost too much. We already had two boards designed with our configuration before I realized it was different from the Parallax cable or I would have changed ours to match theirs.



Thanks,



Carl Cowley


I'm guessing that the cable they sell will switch these two pins during the run. I was lucky enough to have an old servo cable I was able to rearrange the pins to make it work. Now the board triggers fine except it will repeat the message over and over as long as the PIR is active. The Cowlacious documentation says the message should only trigger once and then wait until the PIR is no longer active. I like that detail. Maybe I'm still doing something wrong.

DW


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## hpropman (Jul 27, 2008)

DW

I am sorry I forgot to mention that there is a jumper on the motion detector in the corner of the board. that says H & L

H - Retrigger - Output remains HIGH when sensor is retriggered repeatedly. Output is LOW when Idle (not triggered).

L - Normal -Output goes HIGH then LOW when triggered. Continuous motion results in repeated HIGH/LOW pulses. Ouput is low when Idle.

I use the H setting on mine (retrigger). Try this and see if it is better for you. If it still retriggers then you can either use a microcontroller ( or a controller Prop1, etc) or a 555 time delay circuit between the sensor and the Cowlaciuos board. The time delay will ignore repeated trigger pulses for the time it is configured for. This sensor was designed to be connected to a microcontroller. look at this thread I just designed a circuit that does just that except it controls an MP3 player. If you want to modify it to control the cowlacious board it can be easily done. The link is here.

http://www.hauntforum.com/showthread.php?t=12014


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