The problem was a project I built for my boys was no longer working. I put everything together just a few months back and one of the relays was now failing me. The actual problem was the switch no longer was catching but instead it was simply switching on and off constantly.
I purchased a package of five small relay boards for Arduino projects as I needed two and might use the others on something else. Replacing the old relays with new relays should have been a task of 30 minutes at most, but I spent a lot longer working my project than I expected.
The problem was that one of the relay boards that I was using in my led project was not responding to my signals. Eventually I swapped it out with a different relay board and all of a sudden everything worked perfectly (should have done that sooner).
My real question is why did the first relay’s fail? Did I buy poor quality? Was it because they were mounted on their side? Had they been used more than would normally be expected? Was the power I was using too much for the switch and that caused the short life?
In the past when these types of questions came up I would have asked Mikhail. He was both a sympathetic ear for your problems but was also an interesting sparing partner for verbal debates (I still think that Linux was a good decision for Munich and could have made them vendor independent and saved money in the long run, but they did at least gain the German Microsoft headquarters in Munich. )
I think we all have a “Mikhail” in our neighbor who helps answer our questions about computers, helps us move apartment, helps with minor plumbing, pick up the mail when we are out of town, cheers us up when we are down and also helps us buy our electronics.
We should all remember thank our own Mikhail for their assistance.
